Flashmech

I’ve procrastinated a while to publish this post, because I wasn’t sure how useful it would be to the community. Hack it, I finally feel it’s important enough for all to come to know of this wonderful font that made my programming life better when chunks after chunks of code became much easier to look at.

If you’re still using Courier New, the default font for a lot of IDEs, I can certainly tell you it isn’t the best. Here’s a simple comparison of two variables:

You may or may not notice straightaway, that one of the variables has a "0"(zero) rather than an "O"(capital O) for the text "Outro". Although functionality wise it wouldn’t have cause much of a problem since it’s still a valid variable name, it’s something that I deem as very bad, since it might potentially cause bugs when I least expected it to be.

I began my search sometime around end of last year, and I’m pleased to bring your attention to Dina, which had become my favourite programming font. From the creator’s own words:

Dina is a monospace bitmap font, primarily aimed at programmers. It is relatively compact to allow a lot of code on screen, while (hopefully) clear enough to remain readable even at high resolutions.

Here’s the same comparison of the variables as above. Note how easy it is to spot the mistake now?

The full set of characters from Dina:

And finally an example of how things will look when using Dina for programming:

As the author had hoped, Dina has really allowed me to see huge chunks of codes at 8pt and yet maintains the crisp-and-clear readability. Its clean nature has also made looking for bugs less frustrating (it’s something that I find to be psychological ).

Dina is however, for Windows user only. I’m really keen to know what good programming fonts are out there for Mac users (because I’m thinking of getting myself a MacBook Pro in months to come), so it’ll really help if anyone can recommend some fonts that you have used and feel it’s great to use for programming on a mac.

Download Dina Font

For years I had this thought that since Flash is so much more superior to HTML, there’s really not much point in learning the ins-and-outs of HTML. At that time when this thought first seeded, CSS was something that was not ubiquitous, and browser quirks seem to be the cause that drained the life source out of every web developer’s soul. To avoid that same painful road that many took, I stuck on to that thought and pursued Flash till it’s what I’m doing best today.

Well I guess in my line of work, HTML is something that you cannot run (much less hide) from forever. It was about to be my first HTML website in 5 years, and web standards must have grown so vastly over all this while. After my thoughts had settled, I decided that this would be the best opportunity to relearn my skills.

Instead of using my existing knowledge of using tables to layout the content, I wanted to use some CSS to give order to them, so I picked up "The Essential Guide to CSS and HTML Web Design" from the library as a starting point. Just after reading the first few chapters, I had already realised what I had been missing out all this time.

Given that the deadline was just 10 days away, I was virtually working on the book everyday after work, and improving on what I had the following day. When the project finally went out to the client for approval, though brain-drained, I was glad.

I’ve learnt a whole lot about usability, accessibility, semantic and clean markups, SEO, the quirks between browsers that I have to look out for, breaking down layouts to implement CSS for XHTML based on the design, and I managed to do it all without using a WYSIWYG tool (e.g. Dreamweaver).

As an interactive developer, I feel more empowered now that I know these technologies. Yes, Flash can do a whole lot of things and lets you escape those problems that you would otherwise have to face with HTML, but still, knowing XHTML and CSS is something else altogether.

The past few weeks saw me busy with work, but it was very rewarding as well! I’m a procrastinator, and quite a bad one in fact, considering that AS3 has been out for so long already. The huge mental block wasn’t easy to overcome when I wanted to challenge myself to use AS3 for the projects that I have on hand, but I’m glad I put myself through it.

A little theory which would probably bore everyone, but yet it’s so true. Everything starts out difficult. Once you managed to get yourself past that initial stage, I can guarantee you that most likely you won’t want to step back to AS2 development.

In my midst of self learning, I’ve gathered a lot of resources (which now resides as tabs on my Firefox, and I refuse to close until I blog them ) and learnt a lot about developing with AS3. Without overloading this post with all these information, I’ll be posting them through the next few days whenever I’m free.

Deadline is, however, still tight. It’s looking brighter though, as I’m having a short two weeks break from work starting next week. If all goes well, it will be a two weeks of information gathering (more!) and AS3 blogging!

Happy times ahead~!

It’s weird, but I need confirmation. Solutions are more than welcome.

I’ve installed and uninstalled Adobe CS3 Design Premium twice, and with each uninstall, the size on my hard disk seems to have gone down quite a bit (~600mb). I can’t confirm the actual size because in between the installation I’ve been adding some files on my computer but definitely not ~1.2gb worth.

After each uninstall, I’ll be emptying whatever contents (if any) in my recycle bin, cleaning up the temporary internet folders, and even defragmenting my registry and doing disk clean up. Tried to look into the Program Files folder to find any repository of temporary installation files that might have facilitated the installation, but to no avail. All that couldn’t get me back my lost space.

Anyone experienced this as well?