Update to Black Light & PHP Markdown

Black Light (my application and screen saver for applying effects using the gamma curve) and PHP Markdown (a converter of the Markdown syntax to HTML markup) both got a small update today. Here’s a few comments on this update.

Black Light now at 1.7

The screen saver in Black Light was broken in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard when running on a 64-bit processor because the OS needed to run it in 64-bit mode while the binary only included a 32-bit version. This is now fixed.

The application can now apply a new effect to correct the luminance when you connect your computer to an HDTV. HDTVs typically accept luminance values between 16 and 235 (an old relic of analog times), so when you connect one to a computer the computer has to adjust the luminance correctly. Fortunately this is done automatically, most of the time. But when it doesn’t work (because you’re using some DVI to HDMI adapter), now you can launch Black Light and activate the “HDTV Luminance Adjustment” effect.

PHP Markdown 1.0.1n & Extra 1.2.4

A few bug fixes and I finally activated shortcut reference links. The shortcut reference link feature is something John Gruber added to Markdown.pl 1.0.2 beta allowing you to omit the empty brackets following a reference-style link. In Markdown syntax, it makes this:

Let's read [some text][].

[some text]: http://example.com

equivalent to this:

Let's read [some text].

[some text]: http://example.com

I decided I’d activate the feature even though it’s not officially in the spec. The basis for that decision is that the original Markdown implementation and specification hasn’t been updated for years, and most Markdown implementations out there accept this syntax, as Babelmark shows us.