You know all those really lousy and/or fiscally-challenged companies that bundle 3rd-party applications with their own in an attempt to either make money or slip spyware onto your hard drive? Well, it turns out that Macromedia is trying to emulate them. If you're not careful, the Flash Player, known for its fast, painless download, could now come equipped with your own personal copy of the Yahoo toolbar.

To see it for yourself, open up Internet Explorer on a Windows machine and head to this page: http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash(Windows only).

Here's how it works: You need the Flash Player, so you head on over to the page linked to above. Once there, you are presented with a rather large "Install Now" button, which you click because you, like most people, don't have time to actually read the page. It's the Flash player - what's to know?

If you click, both the Flash player and the Yahoo toolbar install into your browser, and the next time you use IE you have to right-click on the toolbar and deselect "Yahoo Companion" to hide it. Uninstalling it is a whole different problem.

Yes, there is a way to opt-out of the Yahoo toolbar download. Next to the "Install now" button are two radio button options. The default is to get both the player and toolbar; the other installs only the Flash Player. If you happen to read these two options, you will be able to make the choice. But the default option is to get both. That radio button has been selected for you. If you don't happen to read these two options, but do happen to see the blurb about getting both the player and toolbar, you walk away. The last thing you need is an application you didn't ask for, particularly one that will present yet another row of annoying tools in your web browser. You also walk away because you've been trained that applications that come bundled with others are generally a bad thing. We've all had to wipe away spyware at one time or another.

There are many, many things wrong with the decision to allow this to happen. First, the penetration rate of the Flash Player could suffer. Second, the penetration rate of the Flash Player could suffer. Third ... well, you get the point. The Flash Player is the Golden Goose for Macromedia. Its popularity is what keeps Macromedia in business, and a whole lot of developers have jobs because of it, including myself.

Aside from the afforementioned repercussions, there are quite a few things about this that bother me.

First, presuming Macromedia had no other choice, and they simply had to bundle something with the Flash Player, why on Earth would they have chosen Yahoo when Google is clearly the master of the universe when it comes to great customer experiences? Oh, wait - I know why. It's because any browser worth its salt already has a Google search bar built into it.

Second, Macromedia has added 400kb to the Flash Player download by including with it the Yahoo toolbar (nearly doubling the total download weight compared to the Flash Player by itself), but has consistently excluded features from new Flash Player versions because they add too much weight to the player.

I could go on, but I think I've said enough.

Those of you familiar with my work know that I'm a pretty big fan of Macromedia. I'm a user group manager, the author of a book on Flash basics, contributing author for several others, author of 20+ Flash tutorials, and a willing blogger, and I wouldn't do any of this if I didn't believe Macromedia is the best thing around. But every so often, Macromedia does something that simply makes no sense. This one tops my list.

If you feel the same way I do about this decision, blog about it. Shout it from the rooftops. Send email to anyone you can find at Macromedia, and tell them. Go. Go now.

So, someone from Multidmedia.com was supposed to come out and speak at my user group meeting last night about Zinc 2, but things went horribly awry and and the presentation was cancelled. They did offer to send me a canned video presentation to use in place of a real person, but then realized the preso had not yet been updated to coincide with the company's rebranding efforts (Zinc 2 was formerly known as Flash Studio Pro). Ultimately, I was left to do the presentation myself, and had only about two hours to play with Zinc prior to the meeting.

Turns out that two hours was plenty of time.

Zinc 2 is very easy to use right out of the box. For those of you that don't know, Zinc 2 is used to turn Flash applications into projectors (.exe's or Mac apps), with optional installer, splash screen, icon, documentation, EULA, and trial period. You can choose from hundreds of skins for the application windows, and even make your application window transparent, allowing for organically-shaped apps. And this is all very easy to do. Each set of configuration options is grouped under its own tab, so you just follow through the tabs and, when you're done, click "Build". Doing so produces a build log, projector, and an installer (if you included one). From there, you just run the installer and you've got yourself a desktop app. But this is not the great part.

The great part is that Multidmedia has built a library of custom "fscommands" (ActionScript commands that allow communication with the Flash movie's parent application, whether it's an OS, browser, etc). These fscommands allow you to control everything from which com ports your application uses to what happens when a user drags-and-drops something into the application window. There's even a way to insert an instance of IE into your application so you can load standard MIME types into your app (in fact, MDM has a Flash browser example posted on their web site - that's right - a browser built with Flash). In other words, it gives you the power to do a whole lot of things that would normally require C#, C++, or Java.

The extensive library of fscommands make this application worth it's weight in gold. I highly recommend picking up a copy.

One the one hand, it's yet another technology that, in its infancy, has so many restrictions it's like giving up your G5 for a Commodore 64.

On the other hand, it's kinda fun.

So, what the heck is a podSite? Find out.

I don't normally post about Mac-specific software, but I'm making an exception to talk about OmniGraffle 3 because it's such a wonderfully usable application, especially by comparison.

For the past week or so, I've been using Visio at work (on a Windows machine) to construct screenflows and screen diagrams for a new project. I'd never used Visio before, and I was pretty surprised when I opened it up the first time and saw a bright green tools panel and powder blue document background. Wow - that's ugly. But hey, I had to use it to get my job done, so I tried to look past it to find its points of greatness. Turns out there really aren't any.

Yes, it has all the features you'd expect to find in a flowcharting application - palettes for shapes, networking icons, gant charts, UML, etc (all of which remind me of clip art circa 1986), and connector lines and arrows and such - but using the app is like using a 5-year old computer you've recently dusted off and setup in a dark basement. It's slow, unresponsive, stiff, and, well, pretty much a pain in the ... did I mention it's really ugly?

After using Visio for ten minutes, it occured to me that I used to have a license for OmniGraffle on my Mac at home, and found myself suddenly wishing I owned a PowerBook. So, this morning I upgraded my copy of OmniGraffle to v.3, and have been playing with it all morning. To refamiliarize myself with the app, I drew up a wagon wheel screenflow of rhjr.net. It took roughly ten minutes, and it looks quite nice. And using Graffle to accomplish this task was actually ... fun. Why was it fun? Because I got to focus on the work and not the tool. The tool does such an effective job or staying out of my way that the design was the only thing I had to think about.

OmniGraffle is a light application, and it feels light. It contains a lot of the same features as Visio (and some great additional features, such as built-in support for JJG's Visual Vocabulary), but is fast, responsive, flexible, and, well, pretty much a joy to ... did I mention its also aesthetically appealing?

This application makes me wish I had a job that required me to build screenflows, on a Mac, more often. Our entire architecture team at work uses PowerBooks almost exclusively because of Graffle. Our UI guys use Macs for many reasons, but benefit constantly from the simplicity and grace of Graffle when preparing new projects.

In addition to all this, OmniGroup, the makers of OmniGraffle, were very nice about helping me recover my old Graffle license, which was bundled with OS 10.2 and had since been lost after clean install of OS 10.3. (If you're in this situation, by the way, grab the Jaguar restore CD and use the Finder to do a search for ".images" on the CD, then mount OmniGraffle (from the search results) and launch the application once to restore the license file to /Library/Application Suppport/OmniGroup/Software Licenses.) After one or two emails, I had my license recovered and was able to make the upgrade purchase.

Thank you, OmniGroup, for making great software and having great customer service. Viva la Graffle!