My OS X Programming Blog

I took this picture of some tulips I forced for when I don’t have anything to write about. So, here it is!

A while ago, I wrote about my attempt to learn and use cascading style sheets. At that time I also changed my blogging software to do layout with CSS. The page that you’re now reading, e.g., is the result of that effort. These few days I’ve been thinking about building the web site for my accompaniment generation program. I’ve spent some time looking for well-designed pages on the Web for inspiration. I must say there just aren’t that many good-looking pages on the Web! Most web pages just try to fit whatever ads, icons, links, forms, etc. that must be included.

I did find a site that is pretty neat called the CSS Zen Garden. The purpose of that site is to invite people to submit different CSS files (with associated graphic files of course) to achieve different designs and layouts for a (fixed) HTML file provided by the site’s creator Dave Shea. That’s such a brilliant idea! Some of the designs are quite spectacular. They also demonstrate many tricks in the use of CSS. Here’s my attempt to copy one that uses semi-transparent background images to “frame” a “contents area” in the center of a page.

On a different note, while I was studying in the Zen Garden, I needed to print hard copies of HTML and CSS files. I’ve been using a program called source-highlight whenever I needed to get output with syntax highlighting. Unfortunately that program doesn’t support HTML and CSS input files. I found a much more powerful program called highlight, which handles many more input file formats including HTML and CSS. A nice feature is that it can also output LaTeX and TeX file, which the other program can’t output.

I’ve been trying to make a “cooler” version of the bat logo I was working on for my application icon last week. I managed to create the following image with Shapeshifter in Kai’s Power Tools. Unfortunately it doesn’t scale very well down to icon resolution (128 x 128 and smaller). Anyway I think I’ll keep it around and use it as my website’s logo.

[Copyright 2005 Andrew Choi. Use and reproduction of the above icon are prohibited. ]