It is an age old question: How do you teach your girlfriend hex?
I encountered this problem when I was a web developer in college for a late night student activities program aptly named Late Nite Binghamton. My co-worker and girlfriend Mallory was a graduate assistant for the program and had many ideas for how to make the website better and more engaging. While working with her she would often see me typing in the hexadecimal color codes in css such as:
color: #F24A7D
As I am inept with what color look good (I often say that I never learnt colors) I would often ask her for help with picking out colors and I decided that if she was able to give me these colors in their hex color codes it would make us more efficient :) I sat her down and described to her how they work but after talking for a bit I realized that although she understood everything that I said she wouldn’t gain a feel for what hex numbers related to what colors just from hearing me talk.
In order to help her gain this feel I created a simple game called The Mallory Color Guessing Game. The game is a webpage which shows you a large colored box and it is your job to guess what the hex color code is.
After you guess it tells you how close you were to the actual color:
This game was a hit! Mallory loved it and she would compete with me to see who could guess the color the best. Pretty quickly she gained a feel for what the hex digits meant and what color they represented. And that is how I taught my girlfriend hex!
NOTE: Mallory consistently gets over 80% at the Mallory Color Guessing Game.
I am excited to announce that the Snippet Designer is featured in the April issue of MSDN Magazine.
It is featured in the Toolbox column where they highlight useful tools and blogs. Here is a snippet of what it says:
Creating Code Snippets is a lot easier when using Snippet Designer (version 1.1), a free, open-source Add-In for Visual Studio 2008 for creating and editing Code Snippets directly within the IDE. Once you install it, creating a new Code Snippet is as easy as going to the File menu and creating a new Code Snippet File.
That is so cool! If you are interested go and download the Snippet Designer from the Codeplex website and give me more feedback.
Also, in the same article my friend Sara Ford had her blog featured. When I found out the Snippet Designer and Sara’s blog were in the magazine I quickly emailed to ask Sara if she knew about it. She already did and also had an extra copy of the magazine for me!
I just released Snippet Designer 1.1. This is not a major release but just some bug fixes and often requested changes to make the snippet designer more useful.
Some of the most notable changes are:
- Languages Service are turned OFF by default now. Since I was unable to figure out a way to host the C# and VB language services in the snippet editor without causing fake errors in projects I decided to give the users an option to turn them on or off. If you are ok with the fake error you can turn this back on but since it really annoyed me I have it off. I plan in a future release to provide some basic color coding outside of the language service so you can at least have color coded code.
- Many more aspects of the plug in are now configurable through the options menu under Snippet Designer. you can now set the location of the snippet index, set preferences for which snippet languages you would like to appear in the snippet explorer.
- Several bug fixes to how the highlighting of replacements works and performance improvements with it also.
Hopefully these changes will make it much more useful so please download it and try it out here.
The future…
My plans for the future are still up in the air but some of the things I would like to add are:
- More bug fixes and more feature enhancements suggested by many helpful users on the Snippet Designer Codeplex page.
- Ability to color code snippets without using the language service. I have a few options here I have been looking at.
- Create a website to host snippets and allow you to consume and publish from Visual Studio to this website.
I don’t know how much time I will have to commit to any of these but hopefully I will be able to get more work done on this.
Thanks!
