Nocturne Makes Night Mode More Useful
Working from home I often find myself writing code late into the night. It’s the quietest time around the office with no phones to answer, support emails to tend to and no kids running about. The downside is that working in the dim light of a desk lamp while staring at a blazing LSD screen can be a little hard on the eyes.
I was reminded yesterday of a little gem of an app, Nocturne, from QuickSilver creator, Alcor of Blacktree Software. I don’t know that I had ever used this one in the past seeing as it seemed a bit of a duplication of what was possible already in the Universal Access pref pane (white text on black). There is a difference, however, as I learned yesterday after downloading and installing it.
While the Universal Access route will just flip the colors into a perfect negative to what’s on screen, Nocuturne allows you to tweak a few of the colors and even offers some basic hue correction. This is important to me since I am fairly used to my syntax colors in TextMate and by using the hue correction in Nocturne I was able to maintain some familiarity with the code as I was used to seeing it.
I have since become reliant on Nucturne and have spent most of today working in night time mode.
QuickSilver as a file launcher
Being a web designer I like to think that I live on two sides of each certain file; the viewing side and the editing side. What ends up happening to many web designers is they have more than one app that they typically use to open, view or edit a file, depending on the task they need to perform at the moment.
There is often a problem with that. Double clicking or command+O on a file opens it in it’s default app. Right+clicking or control+clicking the file to open the contextual menu then “open with” can be a pain (and slow) depending on the number of apps you run on your system. Opening the app and then browsing through the “Open file” function is too much like work. And finally, dragging the app onto a desktop icon is open useful if you keep everything you ever use in you dock at all times (which I don’t).
So in my ever lasting pursuit of the fastest way around these little hold-ups, I have come to rely on QuickSilver to, once again, saves the day. I use quicksilver to quickly and painlessly open any file with any app I choose and it all takes a few keystrokes and a few seconds:
- Find the file you want to open, like an image (which, for me, opens with Photoshop by default),
- Invoke QuickSilver (command+space in most cases, command+esc for me),
- Start typing the name of the app you want to open your file with, like Preview.app for instance,
- Once you app pops up in the first panel (with 2 or 3 keystrokes), simply drag your file onto the pane (like you would onto a dock icon),
- POOF! The file opens in the app you want and not the files default app.
