A transmission from the deep south.
Can you name a company you admire that spends its time enforcing patents, instead of innovating? Remember the pirate flag you flew over Apple’s headquarters when you were building the Mac? Is Apple part of the Navy now?
— From Wil Shipley’s open letter to Steve Jobs regarding the HTC lawsuits.
Typotheque has launched its webfonts service, enabling site creators to legally embed any of its typefaces via CSS. Pricing for use on the web is set at a very reasonable 20% of the full license cost (plus any bandwidth overage charges), with a 30-day free trial available, and existing license holders of the foundry’s OpenType fonts can create web versions at no extra cost. The service provides helpful tools for subsetting into dozens of languages, and for specifying typographic details such as true small caps and old-style numerals. Read the FAQ and watch the demo video. Alas, the normal caveats apply:
Font rendering is handled by the operating system’s rasterizer. While Apple’s OS X does a great job of rendering all fine details of type on screen, the Windows rasterizer is less refined, so fonts in small sizes don’t look as good as in Mac OS.
Mark Caneso has released a new humanist sans serif family, Ratio. Looks to be a very versatile face, with certain details recalling both Whitney and Auto. No word on the site regarding embedding/licensing restrictions.
Update: Mark sent me his EULA, which allows for several popular forms of embedding, including sIFR, Cufón and font-face. Very good news, especially given some of the other faces he’s working on.
Flash forward nearly eight years, and visiting Google Groups is like touring ancient ruins. On the surface, it looks as clean and shiny as every other Google service, which makes its rotting interior all the more jarring — like visiting Disneyland and finding broken windows and graffiti on Main Street USA.
Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day.
— John Gruber discussing the Ninjawords iPhone app.
Because old business models won’t change, eMusic now looks broken by the very people who deemed it in need of protection. I suppose I’ll hang on till next month, collect my sorry-about-this bonus, and then cancel.
— From Russell Brown’s backgrounder on eMusic’s new pricing regime, from an Australasian perspective. Short story: so it can deliver Sony’s back catalogue to the US, Canada and the EU, eMusic has roughly doubled the price of its tracks, leaving users outside those territories subsidising a product they can’t buy. I’ll stay for a bit to see how it pans out, but this does not look like a particularly fair deal.
This fantastic-looking (and fully licensed) C64 emulator app for iPhone by Manomio has been rejected for violating the SDK’s rule against running emulated or interpreted code on the device. Such a pity, given Apple’s reported excitement about the project at the outset, and the number of similar apps already for sale in the App Store. Think of the in-app purchasing possibilities! I would give pretty much anything to have Bruce Lee in my pocket. (via John Gruber)
TypeKit is a hosted service from Jeff Veen’s Small Batch (and designed by Jason Santa Maria) that promises to make font embedding on websites easier and more secure. I’m excited at the amount of interest in arriving at a solution that benefits all parties: the foundries, their customers and the browsing public, although I share Josh Porter’s fear that trapping development companies (and/or their clients) into a subscription model may further complicate the process. Not much detail yet on how the served files will be protected from theft.
It is not only that this law denies the accused any due process, it is that it stipulates a penalty that no court would impose in adjudicating a copyright complaint even if infringement were proven.
— Russell Brown with a backgrounder on section 92(A) of New Zealand’s soon-to-be-enacted new copyright legislation that will require internet service providers to summarily disconnect the accounts of users even accused of repeated copyright infringement. Twitter users are blacking out their avatars on social networking sites to protest the law, which they believe contravenes the Bill of Rights.
We celebrate influence in the arts, we think it’s important and essential. But imitation we have some ambivalence about, especially because it involves property rights.
— Milton Glaser comes down somewhat harshly against what he terms Shepard Fairey’s “appropriation” of photographic works in the creation of his iconic poster art.
Written and designed by Matthew Buchanan. Colophon. Please give credit. Email
