conanite

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Not at all, on the contrary, thank you. Sometimes my wife comments on my "original" colour combinations when getting the kids dressed in the morning. I retort that she should tag their clothes with proper CSS labels.

But for an icon editor, I'm guessing HSV colour choosers work better for most non-developers. But don't worry, you'll get your #rrggbb field (I prefer it, too :))

done. enjoy!

Thanks for the link, soundsop. Iconfu is a pixel-oriented icon editor written almost entirely in javascript - ie no flash or flex. It uses <canvas> heavily so no Internet Explorer either, sorry microsoft (and google's ex-canvas doesn't do the trick, it doesn't have all the features iconfu needs).

In a previous life I developed web applications at a bank and occasionally we needed icons. Finding the right icon was next to impossible, and MSPaint was our only option for drawing. Most frustratingly of all, in many cases all we needed to do was take a little "adjective" icon (a miniscule '+' or '!' for example) and overlay it on an icon we already had ... not possible.

I figured there had to be a better way, so I quit my cosy job to make iconfu. Technically, it does almost everything I'd want an icon editor to do - especially drawing a given icon on top of another icon. And drawing icons, pixel-by-pixel if necessary. There are some neat features I'd like to add - layers, more HSV controls, multiple parallel edits for example - but not yet. Financially ... um, I'm not sure how to put this ... my family has been very helpful.

I admit I'm biased, but it looks like iconfu is the best online icon editor out there. I haven't figured out how to turn it into cash, yet. HN ideas would be greatly appreciated.

There was some discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=636388 earlier today about the concept of an online icon editor.

hello pg,

iconfu is my site. I work on it when I'm not busy with rainbow ...

what's your username? I'd be happy to upgrade your account for you so you can enjoy full 48x48 pixel bliss.

I bet the pleasure in finding a new way of looking at a problem or a solution, applying an old solution in a novel way to a new problem, or learning to understand new concepts - recursion, tail-call-optimization, metaprogramming, (or whatever cool thing your next language does) - is neurologically similar to what happens when we "get" a joke. New paths are traversed in your brain and you giggle like you did when you first figured out how to put two lego bricks together. For me, anyway, programming is just a grown-up version of playing with lego.

It's true though that in a corporate context, you are dealing with other people's bugs, policies, procedures, documentation, specifications. Most of that isn't programming, even though non-programmers can't always tell the difference.

Even after an attack of debugging, when I've figured out what the problem was, and reconstructed the thought process that led to the code that led to the bug, there's a spark of delight when my brain creates this structure. The debugging may be joyless, but not the fixing.

"fitness" in a Darwinian context has the sense of what a hand does to a glove, rather than physical prowess. Those organisms that survive "fit" their environment better.

Evolution often occurs when due to changes in the environment (climate change, new diseases, new predators) vast numbers of the species die off. The marvels of modern medicine are a less traumatic alternative.

For example, if evolution were to have its way, HIV should kill off those humans who lack the CCR5 gene. This would be bad news for most Africans and Asians, as well as up to 95% of people of European descent.

The deletion mutation of CCR5 in Europeans is possibly an evolutionary adaptation to mediaeval European plagues - the Black Death and smallpox. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5 )

We don't have a moral obligation to evolve. I'll stick with medicine, personally. As well as clothes, houses, electricity, supermarkets, central heating and air conditioning.

The head-banging gets less and less over time. Or else I've developed a thick skull, not sure which.

Experience makes a huge difference - simply because you've seen this problem before, or at least seen this kind of problem before, or maybe you saw the solution to this problem a year ago when you were googling the solution to some other problem and tucked it away in a cavity in your brain.

With experience, you happen to know that there are certain kinds of many-to-many relationships Hibernate can't map in a legacy schema where the foreign key is a subset of a composite primary key. So when you encounter that on your next project you drop right down to SQL, to the wonder and bewilderment of your new colleagues whom you've just converted to an ORM tool because it "abstracts away all that sql stuff".

With experience, you know the kinds of ways certain systems go wrong, the kinds of solutions and workarounds to apply, and most importantly the kinds of things to google for when hunting for the solution.

Even scanning search results pages - to a novice they're homogeneous, but after some time you start ignoring whole classes of results. For example, you're trying to find what some annoying ActiveRecord exception is about, and you realise half of your search results are pointers to subversion log messages mirrored in a thousand places all over the internet. And they don't have the information you're looking for.

As some other commenters observed, you have to push and solve those problems that seem impossible, because the next time around, you'll find the answer a little faster. Keep up the head-banging. It eventually turns into supernatural powers. Just be careful with the wall.

I hope they didn't accidentally take pictures of the police!

you might like to take a peek at http://iconfu.com - it's pixel-oriented, only for smallish icons, not the great big vector icons you get with Illustrator. Some icon design resources are listed at http://iconfu.com/resources/list/icon_design/0.html

(iconfu is my current project, please be nice :))

It's different if your business is advertising - google, radio, and TV. The thing that bothers me with the idea of ad-based businesses is that the people buying your ad space are the ones making the real money. I would rather be them. And, guess what, they're actually selling stuff.

Firstly, congratulations on your children. Secondly, congratulations on caring enough to read about how to parent well. Anything by Faber and Mazlish is well worth reading - and it resonates well with Alfie Kohn. Their work covers eliciting co-operation, alternatives to punishment, encouraging autonomy, dealing with feelings, and much else besides.

rainbow converts arc lists and hashes to and from java List and Map equivalents.

rainbow also uses 'defcall from anarki so you don't ever have to call java-invoke: you can put your java-object in functional position, followed by the method name, followed by the arguments. For example,

  (my-object 'hashCode)

is the equivalent of java's myObject.hashCode(); ... essentially the same number of tokens. I expect to wrap the most popular java libraries behind arc-sounding macros/functions.

rainbow comes with a tetris and a simple arc editor called welder, they both use java's Swing library, take a look if you'd like to see an example of this kind of wrapping. Or try http://www.fnargs.com/2009/01/calling-java-from-arc.html

I think "official arc" still assumes a unix for some functions ... I don't know what PG's final position on this is.