Monday, December 27, 2010

Interested in Type Face and Web Implementation?

Over the last several days I've been engrossed in a series of articles on typography and rendering on digital devices. Type Rendering on the Web Here's a great quote:

At the most basic level, the difference between these two outline formats is a matter of mathematics (cubic vs. quadratic Bézier curves). But a font’s existence as one kind of outline or another can affect its file format, and not all web browsers support all file formats. Buckle up, the next few paragraphs are going to be turbulent.

No single font file format works in all web browsers (yet), so Typekit serves the most appropriate format to each browser: the emerging W3C standard WOFF (Web Open Font Format) wherever possible, Embedded OpenType (EOT) to Internet Explorer (it’s the only format IE8 and earlier will accept), and either raw OpenType (OTF) or raw TrueType (TTF) everywhere else. Type rendering: font outlines and file formats

The above quote is pulled out of context and makes the series of articles seem more abstruse than it is. Anybody interested in why fonts appear different on different browsers and O/S would love this series of articles.

Monday, December 20, 2010

Twitter Has Become the Norm

Twitter is continuing to grow. They added 100,000,000 users in 2010. That's a pheomenal growth, but even more exciting is that it is incorporating itself more in people's lives. According to Sysomos 21 percent of Twitter users now follow more than 100 people, tripling the total last yearand 16 percent have more than 100 followers.


Furthermore an ever increasing percentage of Twitter users provided a bio, name, location and website URL as part of their public profile. Twitter is becoming part-and-parcel of many peoples lives. Woe be to the company which is not aware of Twitter.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

The Dumb Phone Lives On?

Mashable has an article which states that Dumb Phones will be around with us for quite away due to market penetration, availability of 3G networks in 3rd World countries and that "Companies can build apps and port them to dumbphone platforms, or even develop cloud apps based on SMS."

I suppose then that it all boils down to semantics. If a phone that one can use to text and take pictures is a dumb phone then what is a phone that is simply ... a phone? I think the article overstates the point by lumping phones that can send and read text (as an integral part of the phone) with phones which can only send and receive voice. Such a phone can receive a fax or a text but cannot (without modification) store and display the received data.

People bought nearly 62 million smartphones in the second quarter of 2010 (according to Gartner research). But compared to the 264 million new “dumbphones” sold in the same quarter, all those iPhones, Androids, and BlackBerrys are just a drop in the bucket.

How many of those "dumbphones" could send and display text? I would guess an overwhelming majority of them.

Monday, December 6, 2010

The United States of Auto-Complete


Very Small Array has another great visual. This time they typed in the names of states and recorded what Google Auto Completed on a map of the United States.