That's all he wrote

This probably goes without saying, but five and a half years after I launched this blog things here are pretty much dead. It's not from a lack of interest, but time. Between running my own business, developing new products, and everything that being a dad entails, writhing pithy thoughts on a personal blog is a luxury I can no longer afford.

This is hardly goodbye though. I write nearly every day over at SlideShowPro covering all our latest product developments, and there will likely be a re-focusing of Dominey Design sometime this year as well. And then of course there's Twitter, which I found to be rather silly at first blush, but am using more and more to post links and things similar to the "Enjoying" stuff I used to post here. So if for whatever reason you'd like to know what I'm up to, those are the best places to look.

Flat input buttons in Leopard? Here's why.

After installing Leopard this afternoon one of the first things I noticed had nothing to do with the updated operating system, but rather how form input buttons appeared in Safari. The classic silver aqua look had been replaced with a flat, unattractive, style that (for me anyway) left a lot to be desired.

But then I noticed something even stranger -- not every web site had this problem. Inputs on some web sites looked like they used to, while others (including most of mine) were flat and fugly.

So I googled around, but couldn't find anything written about this. So I started messing around with my style sheets, turning attributes assigned to forms and inputs on and off, until I found the culprit: background.

Turns out in Safari 3 if you assign a background color to inputs the browser removes the aqua style button and uses the flat-button style to replicate the color you're after. So if you have flat button syndrome, kill the background color assigned to your inputs (or create a specific class for inputs that has background set to none) and you're be good to go.

Screenshots: Director 1.1b

We're currently in private beta over at SlideShowPro for the next versions of both SlideShowPro (our Flash photo gallery component) and SlideShowPro Director (our CMS). The latter is going through the most dramatic changes, and has pretty much been completely overhauled from top to bottom. I'll write more about both later, but for here are a couple of screenshots that show Director's central "Snapshot" page in two themes - black and white. Here's a look:

Snapshot page: black (default) theme

Snapshot page: white theme

iPhone Day!

Can you stand it? Oh my god, it's iPhone HYSTERIA day. I flipped around cable this morning before heading into the office and it was being fondled by numerous television news outlets. You just can't buy hype like this. Or maybe you can.

Anyway, for those who can't unshackle themselves from their jobs or wait in line at a local Apple store, here's a video you'll appreciate from the Olde English guys (who made that classic "Writers of Lost" clip), and hosted by the sexy things at Super Deluxe. Enjoy.

OS X Software: 1Passwd

Every now and then you download an application that makes an immediate contribution to your daily workflow. For me that was just the case when I decided to give 1Passwd a try about a month ago.

What is it you ask? It's a password manager that makes the process of filling out web forms painless, automatic, and much more secure. It sits in the toolbar of all major OS X web browsers and remembers usernames, passwords, and other data you enter into any web site you visit. And when you return to a site that 1Passwd has saved data for, you can quickly populate the login form and auto-submit to get in quickly.

For years I used a handful of easy-to-remember usernames and passwords at every site I visited. Not because I had to, but because it was such a laborious process coming up with unique data for every site out there; not to mention recording that data somewhere in case I forgot it, or needed to access the site from a different machine. I hobbled by with a variety of methods (with encrypted Keychain notes synced via .Mac being one of my better plans), but I could never find exactly what I was looking for.

That's when I found 1Passwd, and after a couple of weeks learning its quirks and behavior, I can't live without it. I've reset my passwords at nearly every web site I regularly visit with passwords that are much longer, stronger, and impossible for anyone to guess (including me). 1Passwd generates the passwords for me, and automatically remembers the data I enter for my return visit. If I need to know what a password is, I can launch the standalone 1Passwd app and view/edit the details of any saved site.

1Passwd can also sync its data across .Mac, so I'm able to keep both my Mac Pro and MacBook Pro in perfect unison.

The one major drawback in allowing 1Passwd to remember everything for you is that you're pretty much screwed if you need to login to a site from someone else's computer. Not a big deal if you're like me and always carry a laptop wherever you travel, but it's something to keep in mind before taking the plunge.

Check it out.

Safari 3 Public Beta

Apple has released a public beta of Safari 3 for Mac OS X and Windows. Great news of course, but for Mac users it comes with one big caveat -- like IE on Windows, Apple has taken a rather draconian approach by replacing Safari 2 when you install Safari 3. So if you run any Safari add-ons, like Red Snapper or 1passwd, you will not be able to use them (at least for the time being, if their developers feel like supporting the beta).

Thankfully, the public beta does come with an uninstaller that re-installs 2 if you don't want to keep 3, but (from a web development perspective) it would be way more helpful if Apple allowed you to keep both.

Speaking of web development, the release of Safari for Windows is fantastic news. Finally, Windows developers will be able to preview/test their work in Safari, without owning a Mac, and have a pretty accurate (if not identical) representation of what Mac users will see.

Video: Church, Finally!

How to install IE 7 and keep IE 6

As every web developer knows (or should know), testing your work across all major web browsers is part of doing business. My own setup is primarily on OS X using Safari and Firefox, but I also keep Parallels open running Windows XP and IE 6 to quickly catch problems.

But there's one browser missing -- IE 7. Yeah, it's supposed to be much more in-tune with the rest of the browser world when it comes to supporting web standards, but it's still lagging behind and buggy. Up until Vista was released I could pretty well ignore IE 7, but those days are gone.

So...just install IE 7 in XP and everything will be fine, right? Wrong. Installing IE 7 deletes IE 6, which is still the dominant Windows browser to test against. I could install a second build of XP as a separate virtual machine in Parallels, but thanks to Microsoft's draconian activation scheme, that won't work. Buy Vista? I could, but come on. Plunk down nearly two hundred bucks just to use IE 7? There has to be a better way.

Thankfully, there is. Like the old days of evolt.org's browser archive, enterprising developers have built a standalone installer for old versions of IE. Here's how it works -- you install IE 7 through Windows Update, which will remove IE 6 from XP. You then download and run the aforementioned installer, and choose what version of IE you want to bring back to life -- IE 6, IE 5.5, IE 5 and/or IE 4. I went ahead and installed them all.

The result? Five flavors of IE in XP, each running side by side without any code overlap or problems so far as I can see.

Update: Looks like you can use the same XP license with more than one virtual machine in Parallels, though you may be breaking the license agreement (of XP) in doing so. Anyway, all you need to do is clone your existing XP virtual machine, startup the duplicate, and update it with IE 7. Personally, I'd rather keep just one virtual machine running, and not risk the chance of Microsoft crippling / de-authenticating XP, but the clone option seems to work well for some.

Baby Cakes - Role Play

One of my favorite Baby Cakes shorts - "Role Play" - is now live at Super Deluxe. Will be especially funny to anyone with a little D&D knowledge.

Flash CS3 changes SWF embedding

I've been messing around with Flash CS3 on my Macbook Pro, and thus far it's a fantastic upgrade. Not because of new features or the "Adobe interface" (which honestly is just Adobe tabs wrapping old Macromedia UI elements), but because Flash CS3 is a Universal Binary for Intel powered Macs. And...wow. What a difference. CS3 launches in barely a second, the publishing of SWFs is incredibly fast, and the application UI feels much more responsive.

Anyway, on to the point of my post. Interestingly, CS3 changes the default way the app publishes content. In addition to the HTML / SWF it has always created, it now creates a separate Javascript file that the HTML file must use in order for the SWF to appear in a browser.

Embedding with Javascript has been something most seasoned Flash developers have been doing for years, but until now its been kept away from general Flash users. CS3 changes all that. Every Flash user, from beginner on up, will be required to upload this JS file, as well as copy plenty more player embed code if they want to embed movies in a separate HTML document (and then figure out how to change the embed src link to the requisite JS file).

Was there a way around this? Not really. Macromedia/Adobe were caught between a rock and a hard place with the whole Eolas/Internet Explorer lawsuit - which forced a change to how the most popular browser on the planet (grrrr) embeds rich media content - and prevented Flash movies all over the web from auto-playing, not to mention those heinous "Click here to activate" confirmation dialogs. Including a Javascript file resolves these issues, but it'll undoubtedly make life more difficult for Flash beginners.

To the old stuff →