I spend much of my time writing and reading a variety of code in text editors. Eye fatigue is something that I struggle with due to my habits. I’ve come to understand that colors and visual syntax ‘brought to life’ with the right tweaks relieves the eye strain. Yet for some reason, I’ve never found a good color palette syntax that does what I need it to do and does it well ( a big shout-out to tmTheme-Editor, absolutely brilliant ). I wanted something that is functional and relieving on my eyes. I use SublimeText as my editor (with vim bindings), but my theme can be applied to just about any editor that supports tweaking the syntax highlighting (_Sh_). My theme is a standard TextMate theming standard compliant theme. I’m sure it could be adapted for other editors too (please fork it!) .

[caption id=”attachment_429” align=”aligncenter” width=”545”] Downed Rainbow code syntax highlighting example[/caption]

If you’ve seen enough, you can just go to Github now and get the theme! Or read on.

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I recently passed a job offer to a friend who gave the offer consideration, but decided that they were better suited with their current direction. Indirectly related, I also found myself two years ago facing the same choice, and two years prior the same exact choice. In my case, I took the offer both times. I was newly married with very little bills and out of college. At that point taking a risk was not a bad choice, as it is now with multiple loans and a baby. Life makes risk harder to swallow.

XKCD 232

The assumption that I blindly jumped into the new jobs however, is way off target. The same approach has played out in my code development strategies. I may make what seems like a risky choice that later, pays off nearly every time. It’s not random. I saw the jobs and code requirements coming; because, I play chess.

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Many web developers ask ‘what is usability?’. This is one of those topics that I can explain, but it may be easier to demonstrate. My this experiences have led to some principles; one of them is that if I’m going to build it, it must be usable. Unfortunately, many sites that I like, that tout usability, screw up one important concept that annoys me greatly.

I ask myself, “when using a menu, why do I have to drag my mouse from one button to the next, and fear losing the menu if I cross it’s border anywhere?” Some menus are just annoying because they disappear mid mouse move, some are extremely hard to use because of several layers of menus, some I have resorted to using tabs to get to the correct menu item. It’s unfortunate that people can’t get this right.

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While recently using Scribd‘s services, I came across a very nasty bug, and a nice clean fix. Scribd allows developers to tap into a great, but somewhat basic API. One of these settings allows a developer to set a default ‘mode’ before the API then builds the flash calls necessary to display the document. The issue comes up when you choose the ‘slide’ mode as the loading view. No matter what ‘height’ you set, with ‘auto_size’ set to false, the height will adjust to the wrong height.

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I find myself at a crossroads. I really like using jQuery, and I really like not having to write my own plugins as there are some really good ones out there. But I have run into a problem when it comes to a notification system. Let’s take a step back and discuss the purpose for a minute.

Update 7/29/2009
I now have a page dedicated to this at http://www.alldorks.com/wordpress/notify where you can also find the source code repository.

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