Count me in, too. BBEdit is my go-to for coding and I like it as an editor 
for desktop publishing. The notebook file format is an extremely useful 
organizational tool.

Three cheers!

On Wednesday, June 12, 2024 at 5:17:34 PM UTC-5 Alfredo wrote:

> That's an amazingly cool and useful idea. Well implemented with BBEdit. 
> Thanks, Bruce and the BBEdit team.
>
> Alfredo
>
> On Tuesday, June 11, 2024 at 8:04:07 PM UTC-6 Bruce Van Allen wrote:
>
>> Hi Friends, 
>>
>> This week I’m announcing the v1.0 open source release of 
>> spinnerComponent.js, a small Javascript that creates a versatile and 
>> customizable “wait spinner” and adds it to the DOM as an inline HTML 
>> element. 
>>
>> This is a side project to my main work in research and data analysis, but 
>> it scratches the itch to finally be done with the limitations of graphic 
>> images as spinners on web pages. 
>>
>> I put a link below, but my reason for this message is to say how much I 
>> appreciate BBEdit for the several ways it assisted in this and most of my 
>> projects. 
>>
>> No question being posed - I just wanted a place to say this where people 
>> would know what I’m going on about… 
>>
>> So happy to use: 
>>
>> - Obviously, all the BBEdit text editing and processing tools; 
>>
>> - Language servers - what a great addition! 
>>
>> - HTML & Markdown previews 
>>
>> - Run… 
>>
>> - Scripting and Text Factories 
>>
>> - Worksheets - For my dozens of scripts and routines for data analysis, 
>> each one has its own worksheet or sheets, allowing me to maintain and 
>> adjust configs, save a durable record of output messages, more; 
>>
>> - Projects - I can organize all of a software project’s files in one 
>> on-screen place, including both working copies and their associated git 
>> repositories (all still in their respective locations on disk), plus 
>> in-the-box scratchpad, unix worksheet, & chat worksheet; 
>>
>> Now, lemme talk about BBEdit's new Chat Worksheets, and share a few 
>> suggestions: 
>>
>> I decided to dig into Chat Worksheet capabilities with this spinner 
>> project. Part way along my own learning curve in how to get the most out of 
>> them, I find chat sheets very helpful. 
>>
>> For this project, I needed to delve into HTML’s Shadow DOM and templates, 
>> and Javascript's class constructor, all of which I’d been ignoring, and 
>> brush up on my ARIA chops. 
>>
>> I have found that the ai bots, especially Claude, can be like having a 
>> non-judgemental coding instructor always available and usually able to help 
>> me find a solution. I learn just by having to formulate my question, and 
>> then by having to understand the suggestions or feedback the chat provides. 
>>
>> In some cases, I’m asking “What’s the best way to … in [programming 
>> language]?” 
>>
>> In others, I paste in a batch of code - sometimes hundreds of lines - and 
>> say “How can this be optimized?” or “Why do I never see xx expected 
>> output?” or “How could I now add capability for yy?" 
>>
>> If I don’t see obvious errors in the response right away, I try the 
>> suggestions; many times it takes several iterations of going back when it 
>> didn't work; the bot always apologizes and returns with another suggestion. 
>>
>> Sort of a stochastic socratic method that circles in on the optimal code. 
>>
>> Doesn’t always work. On this spinner project, there was one affordance I 
>> wanted the spinners to have, but the chat bot gave me four different 
>> answers, none of which worked, then it repeated one, so I gave up on it. A 
>> few days later the solution came to me, now “obvious” as such things are, 
>> with no help from Claude. 
>>
>> Working in languages I’m more deeply conversant with, I ask fewer “How do 
>> I …?” questions, but I do find chat worksheets helpful in writing tests - 
>> “can I be sure my tests for this subroutine cover input edge cases or 
>> bad/missing input?" 
>>
>> The chat sheet also remembers what’s been said from its beginning, so I 
>> can copy in a whole script at the start and then ask a series of questions 
>> about it without repeating the code. 
>>
>> Sometimes it’s clarifying to check how recent the bot’s knowledge base 
>> is. Some of the ChatGPT bots know nothing about software releases since 
>> 2021, when they were trained. 
>>
>> I could go on, but I especially urge BBEdit users to check out the chat 
>> worksheets for all kinds of questions. As long as you think of it as a 
>> source whose answers need to be verified or tested, and as an opportunity 
>> to learn as you do so, you’re good. 
>>
>> I’ve also asked about things like latitude-longitude alternatives, and 
>> gardening tips for transplanting a tree that sprouted in one of my 
>> containers. 
>>
>> It suggested the word I adopted for the moving part of the spinner: 
>> ‘rotor’. 
>>
>> Oh yeah, <https://bvadata.com/html_spinner_examples.html> 
>>
>> Keep (us) moving forward Barebones! 
>>
>> Many thanks, 
>>
>> — Bruce 
>>
>> _bruce__van_allen__santa_cruz_ca_ 
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>

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