Category: tutplus

In this 1hr 47min video we will go though building a social network checkin application that runs on both iOS and Android phones from the same code base using Adobe Air and Flex. This tutorial will teach you how to interact in an Adobe Air application with a PHP and MySQL backend.

The completed application will allow:
-Users to sign up in-app
-Users to login
-Save login functionality
-View all users on the network
-Check status and location
-View other user’s status and location in Google Maps

The video shows all ActionScript 3 code for the database interaction and the corresponding PHP code to perform the necessary functions to support the application.

This application is not about backend best practices and uses no backend frameworks so that it is able to be followed by most people with regular hosting accounts with PHP and MySQL. This tutorial is about the interaction between the mobile application with a backend to support the social network. It teaches you how to signup, login, view a list of users from a database, update data, and read data in the mobile application.

Before you start this tutorial make sure you have Flash Builder 4.5 or the equivalent installed and a MySQL and PHP server ready to use.

All source code is provided with this tutorial.

Download Mobile Database Interaction (Cross-Platform)

Next Generation JavaScript with AMD and RequireJS

You know it, I know it: there’s no hiding that we both love JavaScript more than almost anything. And we always want to get better at it.

This tutorial will make you better, by teaching you to use the asynchronous module definition spec.

This tutorial is all about RequireJS, and how it works with the AMD specification. We’ll learn all about how to create JavaScript modules that comply with this spec, and how we can use RequireJS to load and interact with these modules. Then, we’ll look at some of the other awesome features of RequireJS.

You’re holding up your hands. You’re saying, “Wait, what? Asynchronous what?” Relax, Skippy. You’ll learn it all with this in-depth, full-length tutorial and 68 minute screencast.

Note: This tutorial is available with a Nettuts+ Premium subscription.

Download Next Generation JavaScript with AMD and RequireJS (Techniques)

“PHP/AJAX Framework” tutorial teaches how to create a basic framework for your website to dynamically load your web pages using AJAX . The difficulty level of this tutorial is intermediate; i.e. some knowledge of PHP , HTML/CSS, jQuery and JavaScript is required.

Download PHP/AJAX Framework (Frameworks)

In this 10-part Premium screencast course, I’m going to teach you exactly how to work with the popular build script tool, Phing. Phing allows us to automate so many of the things we do manually for each project, such as compressing and concatenating code, FTPing files, and pushing projects to GitHub. When you’re ready to dig in, just push play!

Course Overview

1. Introduction
2. Installation and your First Build Script
3. Declaring Properties
4. Creating and Deleting Directories
5. Copying Files with Filesets
6. Compressing CSS Files
7. Compressing JS Files
8. Concatenating Files
9. Compressing HTML and Using Selectors
10. Using Regular Expressions to Update an HTML Page
11. Creating Adhoc Tasks
12. PHP, Regular Expressions, and Completing our Project

This series was recorded in HD, at 1280×720px, with a high quality condenser microphone for optimal viewing.

Download Killer Build Scripts with Phing (PHP)

Buy two of our most popular books and save! Get your copy of How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer and How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer 2 for a special, bundled price. Save $19 by buying them together!

Check out the How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer and Rockstar WordPress Designer 2 landing pages for sample chapters and more information!

You get….

How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer

Theme Like a Professional!

Managing web content has always been tricky, but with WordPress, any web designer can have a flexible, free and powerful CMS to use not just on blogging projects, but on all sorts of websites. In How To Be a Rockstar WordPress Designer you will learn step by step how to take a straight HTML site and power it with WordPress.

During the course of the book you’ll build THREE WordPress themes, a blog, a portfolio site and a general site with menus and submenus. Each theme demonstrates different aspects of WordPress theming and all three are packaged in with the book so you’ll have Photoshop, HTML , CSS and WordPress PHP files to refer to. You can take a look at the three sites online here:

• Demo Blog Theme
• Demo Portfolio Theme
• Demo General Site Theme

How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer comes in pdf.

How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer 2

Want to take your WordPress theme designs to the next level? Rockstar WordPress Designer 2 picks up where the original Rockstar WordPress Designer left off and teaches you the advanced tools for WordPress mastery! Rohan Mehta translates his extensive experience as a WordPress developer into a straight-forward, practical guide to advanced WordPress features like custom post types, widgets, and more.

WordPress is arguably the biggest, most prevalent content management system on the market. Earlier this year, WordPress.org reported that the WordPress CMS has been downloaded over 32.5 million times. WordPress today is no longer regarded as just a blogging tool, though that was the reason it was created. Its flexibility and ease of customization has led WordPress to be one of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) used in the web design and development industry.

As a web designer or developer, WordPress is one of the most potent tools available at your disposal. WordPress 3.0 brings with it a multitude of new features — the long-awaited Menu Manager and Custom Post Types which expand WordPress’ CMS capabilities. In WordPress Rockstar 2, Rohan Mehta teaches you to take advantage of WordPress’ more advanced features, including:

• Using Metaboxes
• Advanced image functions
• Custom widgets and option pages
• Using shortcodes and custom post types
• Internationalization and translation issues
• Crafting threaded comments, breadcrumb navigation, and more!

Project Files Included!

Rockstar WordPress Designer 2 comes in pdf, epub, and mobi formats. What’s more, you’ll have access to all the project files used during the course of the book! This includes Photoshop files of the original design, the basic framework which you’ll build off of, and the completed theme!

Ready to get awesome? Grab a copy of How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer and it’s sequel today!

Download Rockstar WordPress Designer BUNDLE (Design)

Want to take your WordPress theme designs to the next level? Rockstar WordPress Designer 2 picks up where the original Rockstar WordPress Designer left off and teaches you the advanced tools for WordPress mastery! Rohan Mehta translates his extensive experience as a WordPress developer into a straight-forward, practical guide to advanced WordPress features like custom post types, widgets, and more.

WordPress is arguably the biggest, most prevalent content management system on the market. Earlier this year, WordPress.org reported that the WordPress CMS has been downloaded over 32.5 million times. WordPress today is no longer regarded as just a blogging tool, though that was the reason it was created. Its flexibility and ease of customization has led WordPress to be one of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) used in the web design and development industry.

As a web designer or developer, WordPress is one of the most potent tools available at your disposal. WordPress 3.0 brings with it a multitude of new features — the long-awaited Menu Manager and Custom Post Types which expand WordPress’ CMS capabilities. In WordPress Rockstar 2, Rohan Mehta teaches you to take advantage of WordPress’ more advanced features, including:

• Using Metaboxes
• Advanced image functions
• Custom widgets and option pages
• Using shortcodes and custom post types
• Internationalization and translation issues
• Crafting threaded comments, breadcrumb navigation, and more!

Project Files Included!

Once you’re done with this book, you will have a thorough grasp of exactly what is needed to make a WordPress theme usable, flexible and useful. What’s more, you’ll have access to all the project files used during the course of the book! This includes Photoshop files of the original design, the basic framework which you’ll build off of, and the completed theme!

Ready to get awesome? Grab a copy of Rockstar WordPress Designer 2 today!

Download How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer 2 (Web Development)

Quick Overview

Are you stumped by the rather sophisticated nature of CSS ? Getting a grip on this still dewy technology isn’t quite as hard as you might think. Connecting the dots is easier when you have all the vital facts within reach. And that’s what “Mastering CSS ” is all about. This eBook offers 15 hand-picked articles that overflow with professional advice and that reflect the deep experience of the Smashing Magazine authors you trust — authors who know exactly what they’re writing about.

Stop hiding behind cross-browser compatibility issues, and launch a counterstrike. Tame those advanced CSS selectors; learn your way around CSS3 media queries; pioneer the field of CSS3 keyframe animations. Get in the game, and learn how to use advanced CSS typography, CSS3 pseudo-classes and modern CSS layouts, while devising back-up solutions for older browsers.

Formats: PDF , ePub, Mobipocket (DRM-free)
Pages: 365
Language: English
ISBN : 978-3-943075-13-7
Released: August 2011
Publisher: Smashing Media GmbH

Samples
PDF , ePub, Mobipocket (.zip, 4 Mb)

Download Mastering CSS for Web Developers (Web Development)

In this tutorial, we are going to focus on shooting flames & sparklers. We are going to walk you through everything needed to shoot such a pictures. Starting from the needed equipment and materials and continuing through the shoot.

We are going to focus on shooting abstract pictures of fire and sparklers. At first glance many of you may think that it is pretty easy thing to do, but there are a number of challenges to take care of.

First, we are going to focus on everything that we are going to need for such a project. But before we start, let me say that this can be dangerous if you don’t take precautions. Make sure you’re flames or sparklers cannot fall on anything that will ignite. It’s best to do this shoot outside or in a very well ventilated area. Be conscious of what is above and around your flames as well. If you are not an adult, please find one to help you do this. Envato and I cannot be held responsible for any damage or loss that comes as a result of this tutorial.

Download A Detailed Guide To Shooting Fire & Sparklers (Fundamentals)

Bobby Owsinski concludes his series on getting the ultimate guitar sound. Bobby has spent a lifetime achieving just that, and the series is based on his new book, The Ultimate Guitar Tone Handbook.

This is the last in my series on guitar tone that’s based around my book The Ultimate Guitar Tone Handbook (written with Rich Tozzoli). In the series I’ve discussed why acoustic and electric guitars, amplifiers, speaker cabinets and effects sound the way they do, and the best way to record and mix them after you’ve gotten the sound. In the last part of this series, we’ll look at the different ways to mic an acoustic guitar.

Like with the electric guitar, the acoustic has a number of miking possibilities and every engineer has their favorite. Here are a few of the more widely-used techniques as well as a few variations. One important thing to remember before you begin placing mics is that the sound does not come from the soundhole alone. Its tone is a combination of all the elements of the instrument – its body, neck, strings, and the integration of the overall design.

Table of Contents

• Single Mic
• Single Mic Technique #1
• Single Mic Technique #2
• Two Mics
• Two Mic Technique #1 – Recording Different Parts of the Guitar
• Technique #2 – Close And Ambient Miking
• Three Mics
• Three Mic Technique #1
• Three Mic Technique #2
• Other Alternatives
• Stereo Mics
• Clip-On Or Miniature Mic

Download Getting The Ultimate Guitar Sound – Part 7 (Guitar)

There are numerous ways to display Twitter and Facebook posts onto your website, but many of them lack the ability to customize the look and feel of that information. This screencast will demonstrate how to retrieve the raw data from both social media giants and combine them into one feed to use on your website.

Download How to Build a Social News Feed with PHP (PHP)

A Lesson 6-10 of ‘Learning Photoshop – For Busy People’! In these next 5 lessons, a collective of almost 1 hour of training, you will start to get a more full understanding of Photoshops features, how to use them together, and start going into the more intermediate features!

Learning Photoshop – For Busy People, is aimed at teaching you, over the course of 20 lessons, to go from a complete Photoshop Newbie to being able to understand and follow the most advanced tutorials out there.
A lot of teaching material for Photoshop ends up focusing on all the little details that you really don’t need to know. Do you really need to have a full understanding of the coding in Actions? Or a deep knowledge of how Batch Processing works? No, you don’t. I skip over features that are rarely used, and focus solely on the stuff that people actually use to make their work.

Everything is taught hands-on, with practical applications as we go through it all. It’s gonna happen in a relatively fast pace, so fasten your seatbelts!

Lesson 6 (13 minutes)

• Using and Creating Simple Actions.
• Batch Processing.
• History Panel.
• Black and White Adjustment Layers.
• Photo Filter Adjustment Layers.
• Pattern Adjustment Layers.
• Gradient Adjustment Layers.

Lesson 7 (12 minutes)

• Cropping.
• Marquee Selection Tools.
• Image Size vs Canvas Size.
• Text Kerning.
• Paragraph Controls.
• Pasting Text.
• Shape Tools.

Lesson 8 (12 minutes)

• Magic Wand Tool.
• Lasso Tool and other Selection Tools.
• Quick Selection Tool.
• Liquify Tool.

Lesson 9 (9 minutes)

• Content Aware Fill.
• Puppet Warp Tool.
• Transform Warp Tool.
• Color Range Selection.

Lesson 10 (12 minutes)

• Using Grids and Snapping.
• Merging previously taught Techniques.
• Review.

As you progress through the lessons, we will keep using what you learned previously in different and more fluent ways, you’ll get accustomed to the Photoshop Shortcuts, be able to work faster, and start to get an understanding of how everything fits together.

In the end of these next 5 Photoshop Lessons, you will start to gain a more full understanding of Photoshops features, learn some more intermediate techniques, become more fluent in them, learn to use them better and in a more advanced way, and start to be able to merge the different techniques together.

The video is 1200×900, so you can see everything that’s going on (preview is widescreen).
You also get the same JPEG files used in the tutorials, including the finished looks, so you can work alongside the video and compare results!

IMPORTANT NOTE : A Photoshop Sketch action is used in the tutorial, which is NOT included in the download files. The action itself is not important, and is merely used to demonstrate how features work together.
You can get the action here: http://graphicriver.net/item/photograph-to-sketch-art-photoshop-action/238953

Download Learning Photoshop: For Busy People – Lessons 6-10 (Adobe Photoshop)

In this video tutorial, we are going mainly to focus on simulating tilt shift effects in After Effects for video footage. We are going to take a look at two different blur effects that can be used to achieve a realistic look. Finally, we are going to do the same but in Photoshop for still images so you can choose your program and start playing around.

Using a blurring techniques, you can recreate a tilt-shift or Lens Baby effect in Photoshop. When applied to landscape photography, it makes the scene appear to be a macro shot of a miniature. This technique has been very popular in still photography recently, but in this tutorial we’ll apply it to time-lapse photography.

Download How to Apply a Tilt-Shift Effect to Time-Lapse Vid (Fundamentals)

Toby Pitman continues his series of premium guitar tuts, showing you how to incorporate every CAGED position of the Minor Pentatonic scale into your playing. Tabs and notation, a huge range of audio examples, and a loop to play along with are included.

The Minor Pentatonic scale is probably the first thing a guitarist learns. It is without doubt (along with its Major counterpart) the most useful and versatile scale you’ll ever learn. It’s the basis for virtually every minor Blues, Rock, Metal, Country, Pop, Soul, and Jazz lick you’ve ever heard played on a guitar. If you could only play one scale for the rest of your life this would be it! And you’d never run out of ideas!!

The problem is most guitar players find it hard to get past the first position of the scale, commonly referred to as the ‘Blues Box’. This position or ‘shape’ (and it’s very important to understand the difference between a scale and a shape) is only one fifth of the story when it comes to the fretboard.

In this tutorial I’ll explain how you can fully understand this simple scale over the whole neck and release it’s full potential. From lead lines to chord fills you’ll see just how powerful this little scale really is!

Table of Contents

• It’s What You Don’t Play!
• Using With Minor Chords
• The Five Positions
• Position 1 – E Minor Shape
• Position 2 – D Minor Shape
• Position 3 – C Minor Shape
• Position 4 – A Minor Shape
• Position 5 – G Minor Shape
• The Big Picture
• Conclusion

Download A Beginners Guide To The Minor Pentatonic (Guitar)

In this two-part Premium tutorial, we’re going to cover Twilio. Twilio is a web service that allows you to integrate web applications with telecommunications. This is neat because you can use a phone to access your web app, or even your web app to access phones!

This series contains two HD screencasts.

Download Build Communication Apps with Twilio (HTML & CSS)

In this project we will learn how to create a complex vector image step by step and study a lot of techniques, such as the Gradient Mesh, Dynamic Blend, Clipping Mask, Dynamic Art Brushes, Blend Art Brushes, etc. The basic principle of the creation of complex objects is the division of work into simple steps, which we cover here with detail.

Tutorial Author: Iaroslav Lazunov

Download Create Vector Whiskey on the Rocks (Illustration)