Reviewing Building Websites with Joomla (Reviewed by: Rafiq Elmansy)

Joomla is an open-source CMS that enable you to build PHP websites. Hagen Graf's book, Building Websites with Joomla, provides you a complete reference for Joomla CMS features and how to use these features in building dynamic websites and e-commerce web applications.
The book starts with defining the terms and concepts of Joomla to easily understand the tutorial in the book. However, the next chapters start to introduce you to Joomla beginning with the installation in chapter 2 and introducing the Joomla interface features.
The following 4th and 5th chapters show you how to customize Joomla site, menus and managing content.
Chapter 6 includes tutorial about how to install component and modules such as Banners, Contacts, Feeds, Polls and Weblinks.
While the 7th chapter concerns with Forums, Comments and Calendars, the 8th chapter talks about Image Gallery and how to Manage Documents in your site. And chapter 9 concerns with E-commerce.
After describing the content of Joomla, chapter 10 and 11 help you to create your own templates and program extensions.
The writer finishes the book with an online reference of the Mambo and Joomla resources.

Product Details:Writer: Hagen Graf
Book Name: Building Websites with Joomla
Publisher: Packt publishing
ISBN: 1904811949
URL: http://www.packtpub.com/joomla/book

Reviewed by: Rafiq Elmansy

Reviewing Flash 8 Projects for learning Animation and Interactivity (Reviewed by: Rafiq Elmansy)

The Flash 8 projects for learning Animation and Interactivity book is a good resource for beginner to learn animation. It takes you step by step using practice examples to teach you basic animation techniques. The title of the book show two issues the first one is learning animation and I think the writer covered this part very well for beginners. The second issue is Learning Interactivity, which is covered along with the animation. The chapter that causes confusion for me is the 13th chapter. As it talks about e-learning in Flash, which is a very big issue that can not covered in one chapter, even for beginners. I think this part needs another book to cover deeply and give the beginner a strong beginning step in the field of e-learning.
Regardless the 13th chapter I see the book focused well and this helps the beginners to grasp the idea of the animation in Flash.


Product Details:Writer: Rich Shupe & Robert Hoekman, Jr.
Book Name: Flash 8 Projects for learning Animation and Interactivity
Publisher: O'Reilly
ISBN: 0-596-10223-2
URL: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/flashprojects/

Reviewed by: Rafiq Elmansy

DV Filmmaking from start to finish review (Reviewed by: Rafiq Elmansy)

DV Filmmaking for Ian David Aronson gives you in 18 chapter a coverage for the production, post-production and distribution process of the digital film making.The book starts with basic digital Cinematography principles. It covers he process stages such as composing shoots, lighting, shooting, working with cameras, audio, still images and titles.This book doesn’t give you a specific software tutorial, but if you are working learning with video production and video editing program, you should get a background about the whole film making process. However, this book gives you a strong background in this industry. I find this book useful for animators, multimedia designers and creative directors. The two appendixes in the end of the book gives you a tips about getting your work in various media and selling your products. Product Details:Writer: Ian David Aronson

Book Name: DV Filmmaking from start to finish
Publisher: O'Reilly
ISBN: 0-596-00848-1
URL: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/dvfilmmaking/

Reviewed by: Rafiq Elmansy

Reviewing Adobe Illustrator CS2 (By Rafiq Elmansy)

With the high integration between Adobe products such as Flash, After Effects, Photoshop and the new Illustrator CS2, I think Designers and animators should use or move to Adobe Illustrator CS2 in the vector image creation process.

The Adobe Illustrator CS2 is a great tool to create vector graphics in a very easy and simple interface. The new version of Illustrator extended the program capabilities with keeping on the simplicity.

Most of the new features in Illustrator CS2 share the same concept; it speeds up your work and makes it simpler.

In this review, I would like to present an overview over some new features that I consider a strong reason to buy or upgrade to Illustrator CS2:

· Live Trace:

The live Trace button in Illustrator CS2 turns you bitmaps images into vector in a button bush with a wide variety of options. You can choose from presets tracing options such as 6 colors, 16 colors, Photo law or high fidelity, grayscale, hand draw sketch and much more. Also, you can optimize the tracing option you desire using the tracing options dialog box.

Figure 01. The Live Tracing dialog box

· Live Paint

The new Live Paint tool really enhances the painting process as it makes it easier and gives you more capabilities such as creating new shapes from overlapped objects and paths that is detected by the Live paint Bracket tool. This feature allows you to create new colored areas and create complex objects from simple one.

Actually, the Live paint tool turns you overlapped objects into filling areas, which can be filled with colors and selected by the Live paint Selection tool.

· Control palette

As we mentioned in the beginning of this review, Adobe Illustrator gives you features to speed your work. And one of these features is the new Control palette. This new palette makes reaching each tool option much faster and easier. It is located in the top of the Illustrator working space and can be moved around according to your needs.

· Custom workspaces

The new Illustrator CS2 enables you to customize your workspace to fit your needs, and save it as a new Workspace. Also, you can manage your workspaces through the Workspace pop-up menu.

· Adobe Photoshop layer comp support

The new version of Adobe illustrator support the Layer comp created in Photoshop, and lets you select from the Layer comps you create in Photoshop.

Figure 02. Photoshop files import option window in Illustrator CS2

· Adobe Bridge

Adobe Bridge helps you easy locate and manage your Illustrator assets and connect to Adobe Stock Photos for more resource. What is great in Adobe Bridge that it increases the integration between Adobe products and speed your work by easily locate your file and get online assets.

· Mobile Content

Adobe illustrator CS2 extends your capabilities to get artwork out to the tiny screen of the big world of mobility by supporting SVG and tiny SVG format. Adobe illustrator supports saving your work in SVG and tiny SVG format which is support in many handheld and mobile devices. By this new feature, you can extend the market of your work as easy as mouse click.

In addition to the above feature, the new version of Adobe illustrator includes other features such as the ability to assign a spot color to gray scale images, expanded stroke option and PDF/X support.

In my opinion, the extended capabilities in the new version of Adobe Illustrator CS2 really worth to pay 499$ for it. Also, you can upgrade your Illustrator version to CS2 for 169$

And to know more information about Adobe illustrator CS2, you can visit The product page on Adobe site:

http://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator/

10 years of Flash

Adobe is celebrating the Flash 10th birthday, and has launched a microsite for this event. Find more about Adobe celebration on:
http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/dialogbox/flash_anniversary/

It is really great to select me as one of the ten prespective designers that Adobe enterviewed in this occation, find my enterview on the following link:
http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/dialogbox/flash_anniversary/index_07.html