Free Book Download - The Art & Science of CSS

Hello,

You've downloaded samples of our books in the past, so I thought
you'd be interested to hear that for 14 days you can download The
Art & Science Of CSS (worth $29.95) absolutely FREE.

All you need to do is follow @sitepointdotcom on Twitter. It's
a two week Twitaway, so don't miss out —- follow us today!

Don't do Twitter? That's cool, we've got you covered. Check
out our 14-day CSS Twitaway here:

http://www.twitaway.com

Freebies like this are few and far between, so help us spread the
word. Tell everyone you think might be interested in a FREE CSS
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Warm regards,

Shayne Tilley
sitepoint.com

Flex/Flash navigation link problems in Mac OS X

I've had one of the weirdest problems last week when a friend reported that our newly designed navigation menu created in Flex was not working on her MacBook.

Basically, I had a couple of moving Flex Canvas's where I attached mouse click events.

[sourcecode language='jscript']
private function homeClicked(evt:MouseEvent):void {
getURL('/');
}

private function updatesClicked(evt:MouseEvent):void {
getURL('/category/updates');
}

private function storiesClicked(evt:MouseEvent):void {
getURL('/category/stories');
}

private function galleryClicked(evt:MouseEvent):void {
getURL('/category/gallery');
}

private function getURL(url:String):void {
var request:URLRequest;
request = new URLRequest(url);
navigateToURL((request), "_self");
}
[/sourcecode]

We had no problems running this on IE, Firefox and Safari on Windows and Firefox on Ubuntu Linux so we got a little worried why it was not working properly on a Mac.

I initially thought that a popup blocker was probably causing the problem with navigateToURL() so I tried exploring changing the AllowScriptAccess parameter to "always" and use Flash/Flex's support for calling ExternalInterface.

The animated Canvas's also had rollover and rollout effects but they worked fine on all the mentioned platforms including Mac. So the problem must be with the Mac Flash Player not getting the mouse click events.

After several days of searching we discovered that the div where I placed our Flash object had a negative z-index declaration on its stylesheet which was getting in the way of Mac OS X's Flash Player ability to receive mouse clicks.

I simply removed the z-index value and we finally got the links to work on those lovely little MacBooks.

Anyway, thanks to all my friends and their MacBooks for helping me with this very tricky problem.

Now we're off to exploring PaperVision3D...

The Secret to a Successful Website

Got an email today from Manning with the new sets of books due next year.

One of them was of particular interest, the Website Owner's manual.

I've been a web developer for a number of years but mainly focusing on backend technologies.

So it goes without saying that I do not have much experience in managing a site.

The free chapter entitled: The Secret to a Successful Website discusses the crucial role of the site manager.

The book is still in "Early Access" phase and should be available early next year.