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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Get rid of that beta!

Did you purchase an Adobe Creative Suite 3 app? Yeah? Well, did you install the public beta of Photoshop CS3 Adobe offered a few months ago? You did? Alright then. Before installing CS3, Adobe recommends you not only run the uninstaller that came with the beta, but also run this CS3Clean Script to clean out other stuff I assume the uninstaller leaves behind.

Office space found

To follow-up on my previous posts, the hunt for office space is now over. It took a lot of searching throughout East Atlanta, but I'm now under contract for a live/work loft space in Inman Park. A mere five minute drive from my home, the loft is built-out with brand new construction, has street-side entry, and plenty of space for a small business. Photos coming soon.

Shabby Chic

In my continued pursuit of finding office space in Atlanta, my friend Kenny stumbled across a real estate listing for a house in my part of Atlanta. Not just any house, but one I immediately recognized, for it was the cover story of Dwell Magazine about a year ago.

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...
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OS X Software: CleanArchiver

One of the things that has always bothered me about OS X's built-in ZIP compression is the fact that it includes DS_Store and icon file data. It's not a big deal if you're only transferring ZIPs between Macs (for the files are invisible), but if you're distributing ZIPs to the rest of the computing world, they'll see the Mac's trash.

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...
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Friday video: Bukkake Milk

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