Beauty seen through a lens …

OK, I never ever make a second post on the same day (make that “usually” :p) – I am compulsive about things like that but bad habits should be broken <g> Plus, I just saw something which evoked so much feeling in me that I *had to* write about it here. Somebody left a comment on one of my posts just now and I went over to their blog to see what kind of stuff they wrote – it was a photoblog called Days Come and Days Go and I was just browsing through when the photo accompanying one particular entry struck me. I still can’t define what particular thing about this photograph appeals to me but all I can say is that it evokes such a strong emotion in me that I could stare it for hours. It is lovely and it must be such a great talent to be able to see the beauty of nature through a camera’s eye and to present it to the rest of the world. I hope somebody else enjoys this “find” as much as I did 🙂

Books and bindings …

I’ve returned to my original love in reading – science fiction 🙂 I’ve been reading mainly fantasy for a while and the last series I read – the DarkSword trilogy – was excellent because it evoked so much feeling in me. I could identify with the main character, his life and his love and I also could understand the world they lived in. However, once I finished the series, I felt that I needed a change and so I switched back to science fiction and the very first thing I picked up was Murray Leinster’s "Doctor to the Stars".

Now Murray Leinster is (actually it’s probably "was" since I have a feeling that he probably is no longer among the living) one of the older generation science fiction writers – those who had great ideas and simply wanted to tell a story instead of worrying about style and inane amounts of character development :p In fact, he is one of the writers – among whom I number Isaac Asimov, Robert Sheckly, Clifford D. Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, Damon Knight, A. E. Van Vogt and Jack Williams – that I like to pick up any time and read. I probably should include Robert Heinlein in the list too since he’s always been one of my favourites – an author who can come up with a great idea and make you go "wow" .. his "By His Bootstraps" immediately comes to mind by the way – but the last book by him that I read – "Glory Road" – just didn’t work for me. Maybe it was a bit too cynical, maybe I wanted the love story to end happily instead of finding that the woman had just been using the protagonist for her own ends instead of truly loving him – yes, I still believe in love, maybe I’m naive … – but it just didn’t work for me.

But to get back to what I was saying about my current reading, I have found "Doctor to the Stars" to be a great read. It’s a collection of three novellas and has some extremely interesting ideas/plots. One in particular deals with a war between the older generation and the younger generation and it is quite clever how the whole situation was brought about – we always know that is a difference of opinion between generations but this particular story brings it to the level of a war between fathers and sons and I found the whole concept and the psychology behind it interesting. Unfortunately, I finished "Doctor to the Stars" yesterday though I wish there was more to read there – so, it’s on to my next science fiction book …

The next member in the RookSoft suite of software is here 🙂 It’s called Schmer and it basically allows you to design the color scheme for a web page by dragging and dropping colors on a form which displays the various elements of the web page. You can select the body background color, the text color, the link color, the link hover color, the visited link color as well as certain colors for the scrollbar and some form elements as well. You can also define colors for various elements of a table. Once you have got a page looking the way you want, you can simply click a button which creates the CSS for the colors for all the elements on the page. It’s as simple as that! Of course, you can also save the current color scheme or to load an existing color scheme and the color grid from which you drag and drop colors is customizable and is saved upon exit.

This is not a major application – I wrote it in the course of about one day. Schemer, like MailCoder, is what I would call a proglet – a little program which does one thing and one thing only but can be handy at times. Incidentally, don’t look for it on the sidebar yet :p I still have to write some form of documentation for it and then I will list it on the sidebar for download during the course of the day. Hope somebody finds it useful and if you do, let me know – or if you have any suggestions/enhancements in mind, let me know about that too 🙂

I heard from one of my users yesterday that Blog is listed at NoNags and that it had received six ducks – their highest ranking 🙂 Edward had asked me some time back to list Blog at NoNags and I had done so but had forgotten all about it since then. Now I guess I’ll have to add a NoNags awards button to the Blog page – ah I hate all this work :p It’s a funny thing but I have not listed any of my applications with any of the major sites – I think I did submit Blog to Download.com but I have no idea what happened there. BetaNews is the only place that lists my apps regularly and that’s mostly due to the diligence of Eddie who reminds me when I forget to tell him about a new release 🙂

Incidentally, Scope has been receiving some publicity recently too – even though I haven’t worked on it in a while. ShellCity, which had listed it a long while back when I first released it, had featured Scope again this week and that had been picked up by a few other sites including MajorGeeks. So I’ve been getting a few bug reports, suggestions about Scope again and will probably go back to that somewhere along the way and do a proper 2.1 release of Scope while I am at it. But I do have to finish up BlogMan too – I do get sidetracked don’t I? :p I think I’ve done at least two new apps (Nailer and Schemer – hmmm, sounds like a pair of gangsters :p) while working on BlogMan …