September, 2005

technology — Comments Off
15
Sep 05

OSX Font Management

I probably ranted about this way back, but it looks like there is a solution.

I’d like to point out that this is really only relevant to designers, people who happily have hundreds of fonts kicking around, CD’s full. Your average user will be fine with no font management, or just sucky Fontbook.

When Panther arrived, everyone had very high hopes for the new OSX Fontbook. Unfortunately it turned out to suck – really suck, so it was back to the 3rd party applications that never quite matched the elegant joy of old ATM Deluxe on OS9. I never really got on with SuitcaseX and ended up using Master Juggler for ages, although it was still sub optimal and very very slow. I had resigned myself to the situation and ignored it… until in walks Linotype’s new Font ExplorerX.

Font ExplorerX is just exiting beta, is a free download, is cross platform, and just damn works how it should. It can intercept font requests from Quark and Indesign to load up your active fonts on demand if you handle lots of documents from different designers and sources. It offers you the choice of moving or copying fonts from your file system. it has an *almost* great interface – very iTunes… indeed it even includes a Linotype Font Shop online built right in – smart. Very smart. It also seems to handle previews quickly and crash free, unlike the competition.

Best of all … it just works. Only took 5 years to get here, but I’m glad we did.

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design — Comments Off
13
Sep 05

Un-Blog Design Roundup Continued

Continuing a theme I’m noticing, Powazek has that fat bottom-of-page block of links/colophon/functions and archives I’m seeing around the place. I wonder if this is because getting this stuff is difficult to fit (and code) into a third column or that it’s making sense for people to keep it at the bottom of the site? Why have it at all? I’m noticing a big ‘intro’ block at the top of blog front pages too, usually text only – example at nokrev.com. I have almost no opinion on that I guess.

And blimey… there are a lot of very dull entirely similar WordPress sites these days. I’ve heard the alphageeks have been singing it’s praises, hence the recent mass adoption, but is it so bleeding hard to re-template? If so, why use it? Not terribly impressed kids.

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design — Comments Off
13
Sep 05

Un-Bloglike Blog Design Roundup

I’ve always been quite interested by The Register’s front page, although technically it’s not a blog, but the new design of Gawker’s Sploid really pushes this approach out further. It does tend to smush into a big fog of headlines, pictures and captions though – maybe a little reinforcement of the grid would be better? (see pic) hey… what do I know?

Sploid Gridded

Anyway, it got me having a look around a bit more – you know you really miss this stuff through a newsreader, I’m not sure there’s any way round that – enforced custom CSS? Nah. Anyway, Eurogamer is another almost-blog site I think works – yes it’s noisy and brash, with big ads, but the ads are well sold with rich media, trailers in there and it has a strong community backing up each story, in some ways a lot of what I had hoped for the London Line site. Who else? We like Stop Design – great layout on the frontpage, lots of cute infomative graphic details – the posts are more typical though. Jaketracey.com has a fairly standard 2 column page, but hey those tabs on the right are certainly cool – very, very slick. William Peng’s Bombast is a clever twist, reminds me of Matt Webb’s Interconnected for some reason, but crikey, he’s only 16. Respec. Or whatever the kids say these days…

More surfing and design picks later.

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technology — Comments Off
9
Sep 05

Some Apple Guff

Long time, no updates. As usual it’s been a combination of work and life pressures plus it is, like, summer you know? So, topically, let’s hit on some Apple guff first. I did a whole load of software updates as being at least a little wise, one never updates or upgrades a working set up mid-project and we’ve just had a few wind up nicely. I think I skipped a few interim versions, but iTunes 5 is the big one here.

New gradient UI hotness, we like, as do we like the podcasts feature now that there are some half decent ones around. Mixtapes essentially, god forbid I start listening to bedroom DJ types waffling on, christ. Can it handle .zip, .torrent or other podcast filetypes? Can it bugger. So you won’t be getting our hot new mixtape through it then – use iPodder or any RSS newsreader – still there’s always the usual download page. Go on get it, we’ll wait.

Back? Great. Now I’m not sure if my ears are deceiving me, but the sound quality sounds a bit better to me. Could be wrong. So in addition to a big-ish new iTunes we get the iPod Nano… What? It is a thing of beauty. I do declare I want one very much, tape it to the back of a RAZR and it’d still be a better phone than the horrible ROKR thing they brought out the same day. I don’t know, the fuss about this is very undeserving really – doesn’t connect to the store, doesn’t include any unique hardware synergy like a scroll-wheel or just… anything? Am I missing something? It’s just an iPod like UI (except, not) to play iTMS DRM’d tunes on a phone? Phhht, care?

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