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A couple quick bug fixes:

1. Font dialog now defaults to current font
2. Multiple, vertical monitors now supported

Dark Room Project Page

Or, you can just download now.

Well, now that things have settled down from the holiday I sat down and fixed a few of the bugs people were mentioning, and tried to add a couple of “enhancements.” A number of things were done, but here are some of the more important improvements:

1. Added Multiple Undo and Redo
2. Fixed crash when Save As dialog is cancelled
3. Removed scrollbar, replaced with simple navigation bar
4. Removed exit shortcut key conflict with cut command
5. Preferences dialog revamped
6. Added page height preferences
7. Added automatic page width and height setting

Dark Room can be downloaded from the new project page:

Dark Room Project Page

Or, you can just download now.

A few posts ago, I was talking about a pretty slick piece of productivity software named, WriteRoom. I have to admit that I had been using it quite a bit to accomplish quick burst writing. Unfortunately, a couple days ago I was forced to use Windows while I was working on some homework for Managerial Operations. I scoured the internet looking for a similar application for Windows only to find nothing.

The program itself is so simple; it is amazing that nothing like it exists. Actually, as far as fullscreen text editing is concerned, practically nothing exists. Granted, you can use Word and OpenOffice Writer to do a fullscreen mode that is somewhat similar, but the problem with those is that you are forced to use the traditional black on white, which is still pretty hard on the eyes.

I know there are any number of unpleasant fullscreen command line style text editors that are available, such as vim, emacs, etc… But, the problem with those is (from my perspective) that the text fills the entire screen. Now, trying to scan back and forth across the entire screen is a rather difficult and straining endeavor. Thus, one of the simple beauties of WriteBoard, it has a nice column in the center that you determine the width of.

The bottom line is there is nothing like it for Window. Or, I should more accurately say, there WAS nothing like it. I spent a couple hours yesterday, and a few minutes today developing an application that accomplishes the same thing. In fact, I am using it right now to type up this post and it is wonderful.

I have decided to make the application available to the world for download; however I am not releasing the source code, because I do not want to step on the developer’s of WriteRoom’s toes.

So, please use it and let me know what you think. There are definitely a few things that I am working on to make it the most pleasant experience possible. Perhaps the most nagging problem is the fact that I am not aware of a way to change the color of the scrollbar, so no matter what color combination you select, it is still the default color. I might just have to break down and write my own control.

Anyhow, without further ado:

UPDATE: Dark Room has been moved to its own project page, which you can get to from the following link:

Dark Room Project Page

In order to make my life easier while chatting with vanlandw, I have decided to just make a wikipeida bookmarklet. That way when he asks me “what is X” I will just be able to to punch in “X” to the bookmarklet.

wikipedia bookmarklet

Since I have found myself in a reletively unproducitve state due to my illness, I was using Chouse’s lookup service to check various names my dad wanted to try to use for a Hunting & Fishing website he wants to make. The utility retrieves a response from the lookup, and whois commandline tools on the server, and it is pretty barebones.

So, since I basically just wanted to know whether or not a domain name was taken or not, I whipped up my own domain search utility. This utility functions a little differently, I don’t get the lookup information, because I never need that. And, I have a checkbox that allows you to just check to see if the domain is registered without all the raw junk that whois services like to spew back at you. Also, I do not use the commandline utilities, as I use a php solution to directly query whois servers. The main reason that I did this was to setup it up, so (when I get around to it) you can specify which domain server you want it to query instead of a ton of them. This would potentially speed up the response time if you knew exactly where to look. I haven’t implemented that part yet, since I just want blanket searches for now.

Also, for no particular reason I decided to do the lookups using AJAX, and even implemented a couple of fancy “web 2.0″ animation deals. If anyone is interested in checking it out, feel free.

I also set it up, so it can retrieve the domain name from the address, so it can be used as a bookmarklet. However, at this time, it just returns verbose information this way. If I feel there is a need, I may setup another bookmarklet that just gives you the registered or not response. Anyhow, you can drag the domain search bookmarklet to your booksmark to use it.