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Appreciate: the marquee selection
Take a moment to go to your desktop, hold down the mouse and drag a selection rectangle around. The box moves so effortlessly, doesn’t it? Isn’t it kind of neat how the files select themselves on and off as you drag? It works so well that you forget that someone actually had to write code to make it happen. — Likewise, I suppose, the fact that scrollbars light up when your mouse touches them, and that your cursor changes to show you can resize a window when you’re by a corner. All these small things to build up an illusion you are manipulating real, tangible things.
Granted, these aren’t the hardest things in the world to do — but they aren’t gimmes, either. Tonight I spent an hour or so implementing a simple marquee selection, ended up with about 50 lines of Python in the process. It was enough to make me realize how almost everything that appears on a computer screen required some thought and craftsmanship to create.
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