How to Make Safari Render Pre-GZipped Web Fonts

After too many sleepless nights, I’ve finally got Safari to render pre-gzipped fonts. All the fonts in Kernest are pre-compressed on the server (in addition to saving a little bandwidth, it also saves a little disk space and a couple hairs of server performance). I started with this post by Darren Rush on how to …

Ban Helvetica: The Brave New World of Web Fonts – MinneWebCon

I just received confirmation that my ‘Ban Helvetica: The Brave New World of Web Fonts’ presentation has been accepted into MinneWebCon on April 12, 2010 at the University of Minnesota. I’ll be covering; optimizing fonts for web use, browser compatibility, licensing, and answering your questions. Registration is a very reasonable $200.

Expertise is Declared by Others, Not Yourself

One of the ongoing undercurrents of my thinking is the concept of acknowledged expertise. A concrete example – we’re the worst people to write our own résumé. Talking with people we’ve worked with is better. Having others describe us and what we do is far more accurate – if only because there are more of …

Users are a Side Effect or Why Google’s Web Applications are Free

“I get the feeling that all of Google’s products were invented for Google to help streamline the way it does things.” – yellowbkpk Exactly. Just as I wrote about Google’s AppEngine last year, Google’s applications – whether Gmail, Wave, Maps, or the recently announced Buzz – are about reducing costs and streamlining their business. In …

The iPhone, iPad, and the End of QWERTY

“It is just a tragedy that we are taking QWERTY into a new era of devices” – Alec Longstreth in a Wall Street Journal article on this topic. “The solution was to place commonly used letter-pairs (like ‘th’ or ‘st’) so that their typebars were not neighboring, avoiding jams. While it is often said that …