When we left off, we had just finished modeling the various pieces for our oh-so-exciting "cylinder going through a tube" masterpiece that, I'm confident, will earn us a much-deserved Academy Award nomination in the category of best Animated Short. It's just that good. Anyway, today we're going to move over to Layout, set things up, and apply Trailer so the cylinder will actually conform to the tunnel it will be traveling through.

Ah, yes...the venerable Aqua buttons Apple unleashed on the world lo those many years ago. Sure, they may seem a little turn-of-the-century these days, but you still see them littered about like so much confetti. And since the basic Aqua button was heretofore unattainable in Flash without the use of some creative Photoshopping, I can't think of a better model to use for a tutorial on how you can implement Flash 8's new filters and blends to create clean, scalable interface widgets like our old friend the Aqua button.

LightWave is one of those programs that is heavily dependent on plug-ins, so when you hit upon something that LightWave can't easily do by itself, it's not real difficult to find a plug-in to pick up the slack. One particular shortcoming that frustrates many a LightWaver is that while you can have an object follow a motion path, there's no real built-in way to have an object deform along the path it's following. But fret not: there's a darn good plug-in that will ultimately save the day, and it's free to boot. Let's check it out.

Ever since I initially dove headfirst into the shallow end of the pool that is standards-based Web design a couple of years ago, I've endured a love-hate relationship with CSS. I love the flexibility and simplicity of offloading page styles to an external document, but hate the varying ways in which today's modern browsers interpret my intentions. That's where so-called "bad" CSS comes in, and one set of tricks in particular has become an oasis in my quest to get closer to the elusive "pixel-accurate" promise of CSS.

Believe it or not, we've come a long way. Fresh off our triumphant first script from last time, we're going to follow up today with a more casual discussion of such vague and jelly-like concepts as properties, operators, types, and functions. I'm going to try to make all this stuff as clear (and fun, if that's even possible) as I can, because although it's somewhat dry material, it's crucial stuff to (at least partially) grasp if you want to take the next step and start writing truly useful ActionScript.

I'm not a hardcore gamer by any stretch, and while I did manage to acquire a PS2 somewhere along the line, my pathetic library consists of titles scrounged out of the bargain bin. So I was surprised to find myself dropping fifty clams on the first Star Wars Battlefront game last year, and was equally stunned when I got bazillions of late night, procrastination-loving hours out of it. With a track record like that, I just had to run out and snag the sequel right away too. So how does Star Wars Battlefront II measure up to the original?

As I dive deeper and deeper into Flash 8 Pro, a few things are starting to stand out as "stealth" features, meaning that while not exactly highly touted, they are proving themselves highly useful. One such feature is 9-slice scaling (AKA Scale-9), which, judging by its various names, would seem to refer to some sort of scaling and/or slicing. So what exactly is Scale-9, and just how "highly useful" could it possibly be?

To paraphrase T.O., I loves me some Firefox. That said, though, I still find myself using Safari for my day-to-day browsing needs. When you get right down to it, Firefox still doesn't seem polished enough on the Mac for my tastes (just try out the Windows or Linux versions for comparison), and though the situation is improving, Safari often just "feels" better than even the latest Preview Release of Firefox. On the flip side, though, Safari can't hold a candle to Firefox's almost infinite customizability through Extensions and Themes. Or can it?