Job hunting is boring so I’ve been wondering if it would be possible to actually make a semi-decent war-walking app within 24 hours. I know that it’ll never live on the app store because Apple won’t make the API’s needed public (which is why you’ll never see my dissertation app on the store as well) but it seems like a semi decent idea to relief the boredom if only for 1 day.
I shall try and setup some way for people to see how I’m doing at various points of the challenge (most likely screenshots at certain intervals) and I’ll be setting up a mercurial repository for you to all see the code.
I mostly use Textmate to write Java and produce LaTeX documents and as a resutly most of my wishes revolve around this but this is my WISHLIST, things I’d love to have but ultimately wouldn’t be too disappointed if they never appeared. After all I still love Textmate as it is!
Fullscreen mode
The actual editing area centred on the screen and the rest of the screen blacked out ala Pages fullscreen mode.
Code completion
Sure snippets remove some of the need for code completion but it would still be nice to have suggestions sometimes, even an extension of the current autocomplete so that the suggestions it has are displayed to me in a tool tip would be nice.
Better handling of large files
I often use Textmate to open those random log files you find on servers and occasionally to open up a binary to see if I can glean any information from it. When I do this I find myself sat wondering if I should have gone for a fresh cup of tea or not.
Local revision history
Something I first saw in eTextEditor and was instantly jealous of and something I’d really like to see included in Textmate 2 but I know its very pie in the sky…
The way I see this working would be to keep a revision list of the document that is being edited on every save of that individual document. This would mean on each and every save a new revision is created and stored in some type of backend database. This would then keep track of all those little changes to the document and at the same time gives a way back if you decide you don’t want to keep it. Then as an extension of this it should be possible to explicitly create a revision with a commit message so that milestone can be keep. Naturally this would need some kind of funky user interface to be able to navigate though all this information that would constantly be building up. The use of the automatic creation of a revision on a save it would lack commit messages so an interface like Time Machine would provide a good way of visualising the revision information.
Its no secret that I’m a HUGE fan of Textmate for pretty every task that involves Java, latex or any of the more obscure languages that I’m required to try and understand as part of my degree course. At the start of university I had someone ask me why I used Textmate over BlueJ/Eclipse when I was writing code – my answer?
It’s simple and it gets the job done.
Of course even though I love the current version I still want a new shiny copy of Textmate2 and if Allan’s other blog is anything to go by it should be pretty damned awesome.
That there might just be wisdom in the crowd when they are using a location vector tag based system to rank documents.
Who knew?
When including images in a LaTeX document its best to have them as PDF’s – this way they keep any vectorness they have about them and will appear sharp no matter what size you have them. A PNG will be rasterised and look blurry.