I've been deeply involved in a web site rollout. At The University of Akron we are building out a new website after an architectural review and site re-design. The myriad of detail and planning that goes into a site rollout for a large University website is amazing. At the same time it is frustratingly slow going. We are moving to a new content management system on top of everything else. That both helps and hurts the process. It hurts because it is another level of discovery and testing that needs to take place while we are adding content to the site.

The are plenty of tutorials on the web doing this very same thing. But I thought I would put up my basic method for creating a glassy reflective button. It is a simple method and works for quickly creating small buttons for the web. This is done in Illustrator CS2 but any vector application could be used with this method

Little faith will save a man, but little faith cannot do great things.

Charles Spurgeon

Ajaxian had an interesting post. O'Reilly has released the Adobe Air Pocket Guide as a free download. You can get it here.

I was working on a straight Actionscript 3 application in Flex Builder and realized one thing I was missing was a way to do a trace. When I write actionscript I use trace all the time, much like I use the alert in javascript to check the value of variables or to see if I am executing a method when I think I am.

I have been trying to learn the Adobe Flex framework and Flex Builder. In order to use flex, you don't need Flex Builder, but it is a nice application built on top of the Eclipse IDE. It comes in the standalone version, or it can be a plug-in to Eclipse. Either way it is Eclipse re-purposed for writing flex and actionscript. I wanted to see how easily it was to connect to a webservice, so I found a nicely documented webservice to connect my application to.