iPhone App Development Step 1: Hit a Brick Wall

This morning, I had an idea for a iPhone app. After drawing up a couple of sketches on paper – I dove into the internets to look for existing code, sample projects, or at least some tutorials that might get me started. While I did find an extremely simple sample project that did something similar …

Garrick’s Web Technology History

Earlier this week – a message came through the web font mailing list referencing VRML. A painfully slow, barely usable, 3d modeling-for-the-web technology that I experimented with VRML during my time with Jeremy and da5d. And I hadn’t heard of since. Shortly after my adventures in VRML, CSS 2.0 supported custom web fonts as we …

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 …