Weblog

Posted at 4:46pm on 29 Oct 2008

Typetester

Typetester is a brilliant online tool for web designers, allowing them to choose fonts based on what they will actually look like in a browser, rather than trying to guestimate the appearance in Photoshop by disabling antialiasing, etc.

Web typography is generally rather unimaginative due to the cross-platform constraints, but with typetester you can easily pick the best fonts for each platform and a default to fall back to, instead of just going with Verdana, Arial or Trebuchet, or doing everything with images as people have tended to in the past.

Posted at 2:41pm on 29 Oct 2008

Cocotron

Cocotron is a port of the Cocoa libraries to Windows, effectively allowing cross-compilation of Cocoa applications to Windows.

It's not perfect, but if this takes off it could do for Cocoa what Mono has done for .NET - turning it from a proprietary single-platform development API to a sensible choice for cross-platform development.

Glen and Ken Aspeslagh from Ecamm have written a postmortem of their experiences using Cocotron to port their FileMagnet app to Windows.

Posted at 10:12am on 23 Oct 2008

PhoneGap

PhoneGap - an application container for building webapps for the iPhone that can access features of the native Cocoa APIs

Looks fantastic, but I worry that it violates Apple's "no virtual machines" policy.

Flash and Java are both banned on the iPhone because they would allow a backdoor through which developers could bypass the App Store and deliver applications without Apple's consent.

Obviously the iPhone already supports web apps through the browser, but exposing the Cocoa APIs through JavaScript seems to me like it's circumventing the spirit of the rules if not the letter, and Apple have a tendency to ditch such applications without warning.

Definitely worth a look, but be wary of investing a lot of effort into a PhoneGap app for the time being.

Posted at 4:56pm on 08 Oct 2008

Design Behind Bars

Japanese product packaging designers have come up with an innovative way to work around the design restrictions imposed by barcodes.

Posted at 3:13pm on 08 Oct 2008

I think it's meant to be ironic...

The Microsoft developer conference 2008 promotional video

One can only assume that as a young nerd, Bill (or whoever approved this monstrosity) learned to ward off the school bullies by pre-emptively making fun of himself in the hope that it would leave the others with no ammunition left to mock him.

Unfortunately when applied to a multi-national, trillion dollar software company, this approach doesn’t work. Even if you intentionally make yourself look ridiculous, everybody still thinks you’re ridiculous.