Working with the Very Best

Predictably, I can't talk much about what I actually work on at Google (at least not yet). What I can talk about, however, is the absolute joy of working with so many talented people. I'm pretty spoiled in this area from my open source background (the Plone developers are some seriously smart cookies), and it's refreshing to work at a company where the same attitude and talent is prevalent.

Being able to rub shoulders with people like Guido van Rossum (father of Python), Jeff Veen (who just launched the sexy Analytics redesign), Scott Jenson (of Apple and Symbian UIQ fame), Doug Bowman (the now infamous wired.com CSS redesign among other things) and Mike Solomon (the man who makes YouTube (and MySQL) scale, as well as the father of two of my favorite OS X improvements, TerminalColors and PithHelmet) — is amazing.

Equally impressive is the world-class talent that works here that the world has never heard of for some reason. I'm not the one to blow their (intentional or not) covers here, and their names would mean little to you anyway — I guess my point is that there's a lot of great people I work with and/or get to talk with every day. And it's the most rewarding thing about working at Google. Wait, maybe the second most rewarding thing — after the Food.

…but I didn't mean for this to turn into a “my job rocks and yours does not” post. I wanted to tell the story about how the tiny — but incredibly useful — application Nocturne came to be. It hit Lifehacker, 43 Folders, Digg and a lot of other sites over the weekend, so I thought you might be interested in the story behind it.

Of the aforementioned “awesome people” I work with, the one that most often bring out the “no shit?” response from people is that I work with the mysterious creator of Quicksilver, possibly the coolest application in the world — it is pretty much impossible to explain what it does in one sentence, so I won't even try. If you're a Mac weenie like me, you may possibly no longer be capable of operating any computer that doesn't have Quicksilver installed anymore. You have been warned, it's That Good — it becomes an extension of your intentions.

Small talk leads to small apps

The other day I was asking Nicholas^{1 1}…or Alcor, or J, or Cole — he's a man of many names, but since Daring Fireball has already mentioned his real name, I assume it's OK to use it here. whether there was any way to script a particular set of actions and keystrokes that I performed every night when working on my Mac.

To be able to fall asleep at all in the evening, it helps to not stare into large, wide, full brightness monitors for hours on end. So to work in the evenings, my standard motions would be:

1. Press Ctrl-Alt-Apple-8 to put the screen into inverted mode
2. Launch Universal Access preference pane, put the screen into grayscale mode
3. Launch ShadowKiller to get rid of the “glowing shadows” around the windows
   
4. Set the background image to be all white (i.e. black now that the screen was inverted)
5. Reduce the brightness on my screen to a minimum
   

Not an amazing amount of work, but enough to make me look for an automated solution. When I showed this to Nicholas, he said “that shouldn't be too hard to write”, and the next day he walks up to me in the office and says “check it out”.

How long did it take to write? “An hour until I started messing with the effects”. The shiny. Always the bane of developers everywhere.

Nicholas upped the ante, though — he added a mode where he inverts the hue, so that images and colors come out closer to their normal counterparts even if the rest of the page is reversed. Since pictures of things are somewhat common in web pages²²We can't all be like this web site., this feature makes it much more pleasant to browse in night mode than the horror-show reversed pictures of people in black and white that I had gotten used to.

This is how it looks like in the inverted hue mode, showing a page on the New York Times web site. Notice how the person in the image looks slightly off, but you can still make out what the image is, something that is hard in inverted black-and-white mode: (click to view the image in full size)

He also added a nice menu bar icon, lots of tweakable settings and color pickers (also shown in the image).

What's the next logical step? It's as obvious as it is brilliant: Make Nocturne trigger automatically when the light sensor in the Mac detects that the light in the room is below a certain threshold. Of course, Nicholas already has it working, he just hasn't released it yet. Alcor is always one step ahead, even with a simple utility like this.

And the Quicksilver guy wrote me an app. I mean, how cool is that?

Postscript: Immediately after was writing this, Nocturne 1.0.4 with MacBook Pro light sensor support was released — go get it!