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.

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.

Snapshot page: black (default) theme

Snapshot page: white theme

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now, normally I wouldn't have looked at residential housing for office space, but the space was very unique. Open plan, wonderful sunlight, concrete floors, and an iconic architectural style that could easily accentuate the identity of a business. While it wasn't necessarily "commercial," it had enough going for it to be considered. Plus...come on! It was on the cover of Dwell! So I scheduled an appointment with the agent managing the property, and drove over to take a look.

Upon arrival I was quite excited, mixed with an awkward sense of deja vu as the house I had looked at numerous times on the front of a small magazine loomed overhead. I simply couldn't wait to see what it was like inside.

When the agent arrived and we stepped through the front door, the first thing I noticed was an odd pile of material on the floor. It was gray, sponge-like, and in long strands. Upon inspection, it appeared to be some type of insulation you'd pick up at a place like Home Depot. The agent confirmed my suspicion, followed by a statement that blew my mind.

"That stuff was removed for a photo shoot."

Turned out the "insulation," if you could really call it that, was some junk that was wrapped around the edges of that giant door you see in the photo above. And the reason why it was removed for a photo shoot was because it interfered with the clean, unfettered lines of the design.

In other words, by design, the doorway was never intended to have any type of weather stripping or sealant; otherwise it would have been a permanent element. The original architect purposely left the door, and for that matter the rest of the house, penetrable by outside elements for sake of design and the photographer's lens.

As I walked through the rest of the house, I couldn't shake what a shortsighted, irresponsible design decision is was. But the doorway wasn't the only problem. There were misaligned windows, floor tile that extended to the wall and then dropped off into God knows where, and incredibly, a sconce on the wall that had a paper cup for a shade.

Then to cap it all off, the upper loft-areas were surrounded by a railing made out of steel pipes with a cherry-looking wood top. They looked rather stylish from afar, but upon closer inspection the pipes were garden variety stuff you'd pick up at Home Depot with the barcode stickers still affixed to every pipe.

Now, seriously folks. I have no issue with someone using inexpensive materials to pull off a sophisticated looking design (as long as the quality is there, of course), but who in their right mind would leave the stickers on? In their own home? I would have gone crazy with a bottle of goo-gone and a razor blade well before their installation.

Dismayed, I said "no thanks" and moved on.

That was all a few weeks ago. Today though, I'm still thinking about the irony of it all. Did the Dwell photographers notice any of this? How much of what was in the magazine was Photoshopped? Did the architect purposely build the structure as cheaply as possible, knowing what would "shoot well" for editorial purposes, purely to bolster his own career?

I personally hold Dwell in very high regard for their design, editorial viewpoints on urbanism and environmentalism, and promotion of a simpler, more sustainable living style that cuts against the opulent, gluttonous garbage perpetuated by McMansions and Frontgate catalogs. But a home is hardly sustainable if it doesn't last. It's simply bad design.

It all reminds me of Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright, in case you don't know, would often times place his windows so that glass panes butted up against one other without any molding or weather stripping. Why? Because the molding broke the visual line of the glass and was less pleasing to the eye. Guess what happened every time it rained.

Fallingwater, Wright's greatest (or at least most iconic) architectural achievement, has problems with its numerous cantilevers jutting out over the hillside, for their weight is too great for their size. They crack, sag, and if left alone would eventually fall off into the waters below. They're constantly being repaired and bolstered to perpetuate the illusion of stability for the throngs of people who now pass through the home's front door.

It all brings me around to my final point. Good design is not just about being pleasing to the eye, but about working within the confines of the materials and technology at hand and making compromises where need be. Few designers (especially 'print' designers working with web developers) appreciate being told that their work requires revisions because of a technical impossibility, and that'll never change. But the mark of a mature designer is not just one who's willing to compromise and adapt when rendering their work in the real world, but one who's responsible enough to police themselves.

For a while now I've used DropStuff to get around this annoyance, but the app is shareware, and I've never really seen the point of registering compression software (does anyone register WinZip?).
So I was delighted to stumble across a free alternative: CleanArchiver.

This little gem is a Universal Binary, archives to gzip, bzip2, zip and compressed Disk Images, and comes with a variety of options to control which data you'd like to include/exclude from your archives. To use it, you just drag a file / folder onto the app icon, it launches, creates an archive based on your default setting, and quits. Simple and easy.

So if you create ZIPs you need to share, and are fussy about these types of things, throw CleanArchiver into your dock.

Something tells me, thanks to that video title, my Google search hits are about to go through the roof.