Quantitative Typography
Tim Bray links to a study of online typefaces, which concludes that Verdana is good.
Archive for June 21, 2003
Anticipatory Software Design
Pierre Igot writes about “tendency to design software for which the optimal running environment is a computer that does not exist yet.” It’s a real problem, although I disagree with one part of his article:
It is clear that Apple is quite aware that this is an issue. Otherwise, they would not have provided users with the option to turn drop shadows off in iPhoto 2. They would not have introduced the option to turn the Preview display off by default in Columns view in the Finder.
I turned off shadows in iPhoto because I don’t like the way they look, and I turned off previews in the Finder because of the way they interfere with scrolling and keyboard navigation.
End-To-End
Complexity may be a boon to software marketers looking to hype new features and “professionals” who get a thrill out of adding new certification acronyms to their email signature, but it’s bad for almost everyone else.
Apple T-Shirts
Nevin Liber gave a presentation at PSIG 65. He told his tale using T-Shirts he received while working at Apple. He graciously allowed me to photograph them, and I offer them here for your viewing pleasure.
Alpha Users
James Duncan Davidson writes about the spread of PowerBooks and Mac OS X among the computing cognoscenti. That’s such an interesting transition for Apple. Years ago, Macs were used by creative professionals and in education. These days they’re unfortunately disappearing from a lot of schools, but those changes are being countered by increased consumer sales…and a rise in sales to folks like Duncan.
Productivity
This is almost as effective as caffeine for helping me crank out code like mad, especially since I finally put ProjectBuilder into “many windows” mode once and for all. Now my principal development environment looks and feels like a real IDE rather than a clone of that Microsoft Visual Studio garbage everybody seems to think IDEs should be like these days…
Just say no to using laptops on your lap.
The Matrix Reloaded: The Abridged Script
Great stuff from Rod Hilton (via Jamie Zawinski):
KEANU REEVES
Who are you?
THE EXPLAINER
I am The Explainer. I designed the
matrix screenplay. Unable to
decently explain the convoluted plot
well, I have resorted to putting
myself here in the final act and
having you ask all of the questions
the audience wants to ask.
(dramatic pause)
You must begin by asking your own
questions then gradually switch to
asking those of the audience, in
order to not make this scene any
more awkward than it already is.
More Mailsmith
I forgot to mention that Mailsmith 2.0 is a free update. Here’s some more blog coverage of it:
Types in Microsoft Office
Daniel Weise has gotten Microsoft’s Office group to use code annotations and domain specific checkers to catch bugs. His buffer overrun detector uses a dependent type system based on those annotations to turn buffer overruns into type errors.
