All my readers, please note that this is constructive criticism (as well as a fix!) for the new theme, not an emotional rant or complaint. Ben Goodger has done an awesome job in getting Firefox ready for 0.9.
The first time I fired up Firefox 0.9, I wasn’t too happy with the new, default Firefox theme. However, It turns out that it mostly the awkward spacing that was making the icons look out-of-place. As strange as it seems, reducing the spacing makes the entire theme look a lot better.
I managed to reduce the spacing on the toolbar buttons by hacking the skin chrome. You’ll need to place this in a file named “userChrome.css” under your Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\profile\chrome directory.
.toolbarbutton-1,
.toolbarbutton-menubutton-button
{ padding: 3px !important; }
.toolbarbutton-1[checked="true"],
.toolbarbutton-1[open="true"],
.toolbarbutton-menubutton-button[checked="true"],
.toolbarbutton-menubutton-button[open="true"]
{ padding: 4px 2px 2px 4px !important; }
Here’s the shot from before (with awkward spacing):
And after tightening up the spacing a bit:
Looks much better to me - not a huge change, but enough to make me feel more comfortable with it.
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Having been using CVS for the last four years in a commercial environment, I’m certainly pretty comfortable with it. Branching and merging is tricky (sometimes painful) as usual, but losing file history on rename is a killer. WinCVS has been the gravy on top that keeps us using CVS. Anyone who might have had the misfortune of trying to work with command-line rcs or cvs knows how much more productive a GUI makes things.
I’ve been evaluating alternatives in the next generation of free SCC applications. Given the above issues I’ve had with CVS, my requirements are:
- Supports directory/file renaming with file history saving
- Supports common-ancestor file merging (ie: multiple merges to a branch won’t conflict)
- Has a reasonably good GUI to support 90% of the CLI functionality
My “nice-to-haves” would be:
- Visual Studio integration
- Conflict resolution via “three-file method” (file.mine, file.other, file.ancestor) versus embedded conflict markers (CVS-style
>>>>>> and <<<<<< markers)
- Easy on-line backup capability (for any SCC system running off a database)
I’m crossing my fingers waiting for Subversion to support the multiple-merge support. It feels like the project with the most elegant and future-proof design. It certainly is a pain to get up and running on some older RedHat distributions (db4 and Apache 2.0 requirements).
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Myself and a number of co-workers entered the IntensIT competition here in Calgary. The competition is designed for IT workers, the goal being to write as much of a complete system as possible within eight hours.
We ended up taking 1st-place overall thanks entirely to the excellent meshing of our team. I suppose this proves that methodology doesn’t matter whatsoever, but people do… at least when you’re creating an entire system in eight hours, that is.
Oh yeah- using NUnit, NAnt, Draco.NET and CVS really do make your life easier when you’re under the gun.
You can see the other winners here.
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