Author Archives: admin

New social networking sites to keep an eye out for

  • prefacebook.com : Please read this before viewing profiles. Thanks.
  • shitfacebook.com : Which friend are you going to get wasted with tonight? (thanks to Diego)
  • palefacebook.com : Like latenightshots.com, only they’re honest about only letting in privileged white people.
  • whatshisfacebook.com: What was that person’s name again?
  • boldfacebook.com : FOR GRANDMA WHO TYPES EVERYTHING IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE SHE’S GOING BLIND AND/OR THE FONT ON HER COMPUTER IS TOO SMALL.
  • effacebook.com : For those personality traits that you’d rather people not know about… fill out your profile and we’ll show it to no-one.
  • twofacebook.com : for your other online personality, the one you don’t let people see until it’s too late.
  • self-effacebook.com : Are you a sarcastic bastard with low self-esteem and a lot of charm?
  • savefacebook.com : Embarrassed? Insulted someone important? Major faux-pas?
  • defacebook.com : Edit someone else’s profile for a change. Preferably someone you hate.

I’m not going to say I told you so

The whole flap about Apple “bricking” unlocked and hacked iPhones with the latest software update reminds me of this article I wrote about Kaleidoscope in 2003.

I won’t say I told you so because I didn’t, exactly. (In fact, re-reading my article on Freshmeat makes me cringe; it’s a half-thought-out piece of naiive open-source evangelism.) But looking back, this is a story that gets repeated over and over again. It goes like this:

  1. A company releases a popular, closed product.
  2. A third party “hacks” the product and adds killer functionality via an undocumented, reverse-engineered API or infrastructure.
  3. A future update to the software eliminates the hack or alters the reverse-engineered API enough to eliminate the killer functionality.
  4. Go back to step 2.

I’m not suprised that this story is being repeated with the iPhone, because if there’s any company that’s extremely likely to take step 3, it’s Apple. Their entire business is based on total control of the whole widget, and they are doing a killer job. It wouldn’t be fair to expect them to even care about whether a new OS will break unofficial uses of hardware interfaces in the iPhone that weren’t documented or intended for third-party use.

It’s an old story, and I’m sure we’ll hear it again someday.

Optical kerning demo

I’ve finally found the time to get the RoboFab libraries for Python working for me, and I’ve coded the core of the optical kerning algorithm that’s been rattling around in my head for a few years. My test input font consists of six characters meant to imitate A, V, H, O, t, X and a diamond shape. I was only expecting the algorithm to generate approximate kernings that would need to be tweaked by hand, but surprise, surprise; it’s almost perfect:

optical_kerning.png

The only problem really is the tXt kerning, and that’s more an artifact of the too-regular, sans-serif shape of the glyphs.

The algorithm takes 1.7 2.6 seconds (wall time) to generate kern pairs for the 49 36 combinations of these seven six glyphs (including the time to read the font off disk, and convert it to UFO, and write that back to disk). That works out to faster than 0.036 0.072 seconds per glyph pair. Implementing the algorithm in C and caching the most common digraphs/kerning pairs might make it fast enough to use in a text-editing or layout program. (Struck out items are from before I added the diamond glyph and re-wrote some parts of the algorithm to be cleverer.)

Next step is to clean it up into a real application and run it on a full set of glyphs from a serif font, and compare the result with the font’s hand-kerning.

A good, fast optical kerning algorithm would even let you kern together different faces and different sizes. Wow, this is exciting.

An injected-plastic mold of the future

Douglas Coupland in the New York Times with a particularly apt summary of a little typeface from Switzerland:

Helvetica essentially takes any word or phrase and pressure-washes it into sterility. I love it.

How can it be that a brilliant author loves a face that enforces such sterility? Granted, Helvetica fits better with the postmodern ennui of Coupland’s novels than with most other authors. But words are supposed to have personality and life; who wants to read a sterile novel?

Although I doubt I’ll ever agree with Helvetica’s many fans, I am beginning to see why they are fans. To many it is a face that evokes the comfortable modernity and consensus society of the second half of the twentieth century in the Western world. If you were brought up expecting the future to be the same, the grunge typography revolution initiated by digital typography would just be another reminder that your pressure-washed sterile future is lost forever.

I’ve always expected the future to be some dystopian hybrid of Zardoz, Six-String Samaurai, and Dark City. In that context, hanging on to Helvetica seems just nostalgia for an injected-plastic mold of the future, long past irrelevant.

I think I’ll go work some more on my deconstructivist typefaces now.

The Dimwit Future Society

The World Future Society (complete with a particularly egregious use of Helvetica) has some choice tidbits about our future.

Forecast #1: Generation Y will migrate heavily overseas.

This one’s the only one that’s truly new to me; and it’s also already evident in my friends.

Forecast #2: Dwindling supplies of water in China will impact the global economy.

This one has a typo. The word “China” appears to have been inserted randomly in the middle of the sentence. Dwindling supplies of water everywhere have been impacting the global economy for years. The situation in the middle east is partly about Israel’s control of water supplies, and the shrinking and polluted Aral sea is affecting Kazakh and Uzbek industry.

Forecast #3: Workers will increasingly choose more time over more money.

Duuuh. On the first day of my 10th grade English class, in 1992, our teacher said “Your generation is different because you care more about time than about money.” That was a prediction in 1992. It’s a fact in 2007.

Forecast #4: We’ll incorporate wireless technology into our thought processing by 2030.

This one’s a howler. “Wireless” technology? For those of you who don’t know what “wireless” means, it means “without wires.” I don’t know about you, but my brain already processes thoughts and interacts with the rest of the world in a purely wireless fashion. Seems like they threw in the word “wireless” because so many people are using “wireless” as a generic term for “hi-tech.” Wireless is a communication channel; methods of transmitting information are not the same as sheer computational power or breakthrough human-computer interfaces. The latter two may eventually improve our thought processing; “wireless” technology will not impact it any more than a national postal service did.

Forecast #5: Children’s “nature deficit disorder” will grow as a health threat.

I was unaware of this acronym-ready “nature deficit disorder” catch phrase. But, uh, being in nature is good for you? And people are exposed to nature less now that they live in big urban areas? NEWSFLASH!

Forecast #6: Outlook for Asia: China for the short term, India for the long term.

Duuuh.

Forecast #7: The robotic workforce will change how bosses value employees.

Reminiscent of any familiar argument you’ve heard before? Oh, this is a real concern because big corporations value their employees so highly, right?

Forecast #8: The costs of global-warming-related disasters will reach $150 billion per year.

Guys, for everybody except the Republican Party, global warming was a prediction fifteen years ago. Today, it’s a fact, and the economic impacts are obvious.

Forecast #9: Companies will see the age range of their workers span four generations.

Wow, you read the US Census.

Forecast #10: A rise of disabled Americans will strain public transportation systems.

Wow, you read the US Census, and you’ve been driving to work so long you haven’t noticed that public transportation systems are already strained beyond the breaking point, not just for disabled people, but for everybody.

Predicting the future is hard. Your obvious and vacuous projections of current trends don’t impress me.

Take that, god

This lawsuit against god for acts of terrorism will hopefully be summarily decided in favor of the plaintiff when the defendant fails to show up. If not, maybe they can turn it into the biggest class action ever. Of course, the penalty needs to be big enough to be meaningful to the defendant, which in god’s case, would have to be infinite. That means an infinite amount of money for each plaintiff in the class, which would really bollox up the economy. I wonder how the court will decide the countability of the infinite settlement.

Sunday evening typography: RoboFab, Ljubljana

RoboFab looks interesting but unfortunately seems to be abandonware. The docs imply it should work under Unix, but nearly everything I try to do tracebacks with a message about GUI elements only working on MacOS or Windows. An email to the info address on their webpage bounced back undelivered after a few days. The wiki is busted, and the Google group lists three messages total, two of which are test messages. And the licensing situation is complicated, which would discourage me from contributing improvements to RoboFab or releasing any program I wrote using it. It’s not an initially inspiring project to get involved with, but I’m going to keep hacking, as there are a myriad font-creation tasks that could be partially or completely automated with something like RoboFab.

t.26 has two nice modern blackletter faces, Wexford Oakley and Nightjar, plus one just plain crazy face, Tonic In Gear.

I’ve posted on Typophile work in progress on Ljubljana, a face I started working on in 2005 during my European trip which began in the city of the same name.

sample.png

False positives, false negatives

You’ve probably already read the news about Microsoft’s broken anti-piracy system breaking down completely over the last weekend. This caused an unknown, but presumably large, number of legitimate copies of Windows to be marked as pirated.

This video, however, shows an Ubuntu Linux computer running Wine, a Windows emulator, and IE 6 from ies4linux, running the same anti-piracy validation software. And the punchline? The validation succeeded; Microsoft’s program marked the computer as legitimate.

Of course, everything happening in this video is legitimate; Wine is a totally legal reverse-engineering of the Windows system libraries, and ies4linux works by downloading all the necessary, freely available parts of IE 6 from Microsoft and installing them. All legal, assuming you own a copy of Windows. But wouldn’t you expect that the anti-piracy tool from one of the biggest software companies in the world would notice that it was being run on what is effectively a different operating system?