I was just looking through An App a Day when I found Day 10 - Jedi Concentrate. It was neat, but has some flaws. But that's beside the point.

I think it would be great to have an app that you could toggle on or off that just dimmed the entire screen no matter what app had focus. So I decided to check out Skrommel's software to find what I was looking for and I noticed that Skrommel has already made a few of these "An app a day" programs. Jedi Concentrate included, except it's called Ghoster or something like that. (By the way, it doesn't work on my second monitor.) The next best thing I found was DimSaver.

So anyway, I'd like an app that has a user-customizable amount to dim the screen. I'd use it for night time computer use to get rid of the brightness headaches. Could also be useful to dim the whiteness on monitors that flicker.

Thanks in advance!

So I downloaded XNA (2MB download, awesome!) then went to install it and it said I needed to download and install Visual C# Studio Express first. So I downloaded it and installed it. Then I installed XNA, which consisted in downloading another 800MB of files. So much for the 2MB download. . . While I was waiting for that to finish downloading and installing I was looking on Microsoft's page on what was required to run XNA. It said I needed to also have the Direct X 9 SDK from August 2005, which was very close to 1GB, if I recall correctly.

Hours later when I finally got everything installed and running, I opened up the tutorial included with XNA on making my first game. Followed the directions, it said to compile the program and run. Oops! Compile error. I corrected an inconsistency in variable/function naming. Compile and run. What? Another compile error? Go over the code and can't figure out what's wrong. Keep getting an error about the graphic file I'm using. Check to see what file types it supports. Gif is included. File should work. . . Wonder if perhaps the long name is causing problems. Shorten file name and compile. File not found. Oops, I forgot to update the file in the solution manager. Hmmm. . . The text box for changing the path is grayed out. Maybe it's because the compiler is still running. Close it. Nope, still greyed out. Close all open files. Still can't change it. Close VC#SE2005 and reopen. There we go, I can update it now.

Now how the heck do I open up my program I was working on? And where the heck did my Solution Manager and Toolbox go to? View -> Solution Manager. View -> Toolbox. Cool they hide on the side of the screen. I set them to autohide. Figure out how to open up my source code again. Nice, should work now. Compile and Run. Still an error. What is the problem? Go over it again and can't find anything wrong. Can't find my Toolbox or Solutions Manager anymore. Reopen them. Decide to cut and paste entire code from the example into the source code, changing only the example file name for the sprite to the actual filename on my system. That should do it! Compile and Run. WHAT? Still getting an error on that line of code that uses the sprite. Click on error message. It says "Click here for more details." I click. Read more details. Can't see how those details have anything to do with what I'm doing. Mess around with it for another 20 minutes, copying and pasting again from the tutorial, word for word, line for line, except that filename. Compile and Run. Same error. And where the heck did my Solutions Manager and Toolbox go?!! Open them again.

Frustrated, as it is the fifth time now that I've been following tutorials on programming in C or C++ or C# with Microsoft products over the past few years the tutorial source code does not compile on my system. Close XNA/VC#SE2005 in disgust and post about it here the next day.

 :nono2: :wallbash: