Initial Thoughts on Google Offering Droid for @font-face Use

My initial thoughts on Google offering a hosted version of Droid:

This is more an extension of their mobile play than getting into the font hosting.

    Here’s why:

  • The Android handsets only display the Droid family of fonts.
  • Google’s stated a number of times they’re serious about being successful in mobile.
  • Google is a web app company – not a native-software-on-the-device company (i.e. Apple, Microsoft).
  • By offering a hosted version of Droid – they’ve made it much easier for their internal teams to simulate what their web apps (i.e. Google Docs, Calendar, etc) will look like on Android devices w/o needing to actually use a phone.

Of course, I reserve the right to change my position when I see Google hosting something other than Droid. 🙂

Update – I’m now changing my position 😀
This guide explains how to use the Google Font API to add web fonts to your pages. As I mentioned on the Kernest blog – this is a huge win for openly licensed fonts.

Returning the Page

Back in art school – I spent some time with a designer-turned-fine-artist name Eric (last name since forgotten).

Aside from his crash course in contemporary fine art of the late 1990s the thing I remember most about him was his answer to my question:

Why did you switch from design to fine art?

He looks up, while adjusting the positioning of a Deutsch Mark on a string and a piggy bank in a sculpture spanning the diagonal length of his apartment, and states:

“Graphic design is ephemera. It’s meant to be thrown away. I want to create something that’s meant to stay.”

2005-Present: I Protect

stone-iprotect

Great talk from Linda Stone on what comes after ‘continuous partial attention’. She argues that it’s filtering, engagement, discernment, and a striving for intimacy and a quality of live. “Understanding Workers” vs. “Knowledge Workers”

Conversely, being tuned into the always-on, real-time stream creates a constant sense of crisis. Additionally, this constant fight-or-flight actually prevents innovation and creativity.

I wholly agree. But you already knew that.

Good stuff.

May I have your attention please? – Linda Stone – SIME 09 from Ayman van Bregt on Vimeo.

What’s My Next Telephone?

My mobile phone is starting to show it’s age. More sketchy connections, increased static and general inability to hear the other person on the line.

All independent of who I’m talking with or whether I’m on T-Mobile’s GSM network or a WiFi network.

All making me more unhappy with a device that increasingly feels like a buggy whip.

This weekend, I stopped by the T-Mobile store in the nearby mall. It was disheveled, half the demo phones were missing, and the displays were falling apart. Like their website, I couldn’t get a good sense what interesting phones they had – let alone which ones they wanted to sell me. The associate behind the counter was more interested in determining if my account was eligible for an upgrade than upselling me on a sexy new handset.

I kept thinking – maybe I should just buy an unlocked Nexus One.

Though – all I’m really looking for is an easy way to make voice calls- all that other smart phone stuff? Between a laptop, iPod Touch, and iPad, I’ve got it covered.

Two years ago, I predicted that once it expired, I wouldn’t be renewing my monthly mobile phone service plan.

If you’re a betting man – it still looks like a good bet.

The question is – if I drop my monthly mobile phone service, how do I make voice calls?

I’d like a mobile device optimized for the voice call experience. I don’t see that anywhere on the market.

So, what should my next phone be?

Upate 27 May 2010:
Early tests show Peter Cooper may have the answer.

“Ooh, a docked iPad + Skype == an awesome desk phone (sound is great both ways) even stuck with the scaled-up iPhone app for now”

Ongoing List of Foods I Shouldn’t Eat

(NOTE: Like many of my other ongoing lists, this post is primarily for my memory – rumor is it’s the first to go with age.)

I’ve been fortunate that to date – and been able to maintain a very omnivorous diet. Surpassing 35 has brought with many changes. Most notably – I now have a list of foods that make me feel worse that I did before I ate them.

The list so far:

  • Milk
  • Pistacchios
  • Anything from IKEA’s Cafe
  • Anything from Chipotle

Fontue Font Optimization Workflow – Open Sourced

With the Fontue web font server open sourced, I’ve done the same for the workflow scripts I use to to generate the fonts for @font-face use.

It’s a pair of scripts that pipe fonts in and out of other conversion programs like FontForge, sfnt2woff, Batik, and EOTFast. Along the way, doing a little clean up of the font file itself.

These workflow scripts are now included in the Fontue source code.

Kernest’s Web Font Serving Engine – Fontue – Now Open Source

I’ve talked to a number of people and organizations that want to start adding web fonts to their websites – but aren’t comfortable relying on a third-party service for something so integral to their online presence.

With that in mind, I’m pleased to announced that Kernest‘s underlying web font serving engine – dubbed Fontue – has been released under the MIT License.

Fontue is designed to be the lightest, fastest way to serve web fonts to @font-face supporting browsers while saving bandwidth and keeping CSS clean and readable.

Get more information at Fontue.com or download the latest version from Github.

An iPad App I’d Like to See – Shorthand

Inputing anything on the iPad more complex than – ‘I want that’ – is frustrating, even moreso with the keyboard.

The thought of taking notes on the iPad during meetings is still ridiculous. And I started wondering how people quickly took notes before we all became such proficient touch typists.

Eclectic_shorthand_by_cross

The idea of a single gesture representing a word (or series of words) rather than a single character is very appealing. And with a Javascript library like Raphaël, this could even be a web-based app.

Shorthand has least as much of a learning curve as QWERTY.