Buddy Sean asked me about choosing fonts for software development. "What is a good legible font for software? Where do you find out more information about this? Is there a developer kit you can buy or download?"
When it comes to software font use, you should look for fonts that are designed for the screen. They are heavily "hinted" to display well at various common sizes like 9pt through 14pt. An ordinary font purchased for print work will not look consistently good at small size in a GUI application. You want either a bitmapped screen font (somewhat rare these days), or a "new media" font designed for screen use in TrueType or OpenType format. Bitstream has an example of the difference.
Now you have two options:
Option 1. Use What's Already Installed
If you're designing for Windows software development, you can rely on the built-in high-quality screen fonts such as Arial, Tahoma, Georgia, Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Courier New, and Times New Roman. Not all of them are installed depending on your version of Windows, so you may have to track down the original vendors. You can double-click the font list in the Windows Fonts Control Panel...Arial, for example, is licensed from AgfaMonotype.
The Microsoft Typography site has a listing of what fonts are included with what Microsoft products.
If you're designing for both Macintosh and Windows, many of the fonts above are already installed because Microsoft Internet Explorer for Mac has been installed by default in Mac OS 9 through Mac OS 10.3. For advanced users who have chosen not to install Internet Explorer, those fonts may not be available. It's also possible that Internet Explorer will go away from future versions of the Mac OS.
Option 2. License Fonts and Include with your Installer
You also have the option of licensing fonts for your applications, and including them as part of the install. I've not gone this route personally, but there are developer resources at AgfaMonotype. ...check out the ISV (Independent Software Developer) fonts. Another competitor is Bitstream, which offers similar solutions for developers.
Miscellania
If you're designing for internationalization, you need to look a little deeper into which fonts offer unicode support. This is the kind of thing that a developer needs to go after... in general, you'll lose typographic control because your options are limited in the other languages. Internationalization is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
I'm curious whether fonts optimized for Flash, are also suitable for general application development. A lot of these are designed to be precise at 5 to 12 pixels in height, which is really small on a modern screen. They might be OK for labeling, applications that "look cool" like games, or devices that run at 800x600 or smaller. Legibility would be difficult at higher resolutions.
There are also old font formats that are completely converted for screen use at a specific size...Mac users may remember "screen fonts". It's been a long time since I've seen any, but I know applications like Photoshop and specialized software like terminal emulators use them.
If you want to get extra fancy, there's a technology called Saffron you can license from Mitsubishi, that promises excellent legibility without a lot of hinting and kerning BS. The next version of Flash Player (version 8) apparently uses this. This is a more specialized application though, than your typical windows app. Would be interesting for games or bitmapped screen devices.
I was browsing through lileks.com after visiting the Gallery of Regrettable Food, which preserves stomach-churning food photography of the 50s and 60s. There's also a neat section on Money on the World...check out Brazil and Cuba! A country's money tends to be filled with interesting iconography and symbolism too, so that's well worth checking out from a graphic design perspective.
You can see a lot of their other projects as part of their Institute of Official Cheer. It's a good waste of an hour.
Back in my high school days, I found that I liked knowing the hoary details of low level computer operations: assembly language, instruction decoding, firmware and register manipulation.
One regret I've had, though, is not ever taking a Compilers course. That is, how to write a compiler for a language like C or C++. Unlike some of the fruitier "Learn to code in Pascal, LANGUAGE OF THE FUTURE" courses, writing a compiler is a marriage between expression of code in a high level language and implementation in nice spurts of machine code. While I have no great desire to write compilers for a living, I do wish I knew more about how they work. So I was bopping around the web today and came across Inger, an open-source compiler with an e-book. Cool. And also Open C++, an open-source C++ compiler project. The Internet rocks.
My desktop PC, used primarily for production, started making a funny fan noise a couple days ago. Today, it emited an alarm noise on powerup. This usually means something bad, so I had to diagnose the problem.
It turns out that the CPU cooling fan was worn out. It's only a year or so old, so it's kind of irking. Today's CPU's need active cooling fans, so when they poop out you have a few seconds to shut down before they melt down. Fortunately, my motherboard detects these anomalies and shuts down. So I went down to CompUSA and got a new one:
Behold!
This is an "enthusiast" CPU cooler, with an adjustable knob you can mount on your PC to control the fan speed. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work very well with the fan speed detection circuitry on my motherboard. For $14, it was one of the cheaper Athlon coolers, and it certainly looked neat. So far temperatures seem acceptable...not amazingly low, but at least my computer isn't beeping at me anymore.
I was giving the ViewLevel plugin a try, but at first it was "no dice."
The $user_level variable wasn't being set, or evaluated to 0. As it turned out, my WordPress URI settings were set back to the default "www.davidseah.com" address, but I usually login at "davidseah.com". The cookies are different in each case, so my user level wasn't being read. I must have accidentally reset it when explaining how it worked to someone setting up their own blog last week.
So it seems to work great. I can now implement some private posts for friends, without having EVERYONE be able to see them.
I think this is Lao & Harlan's Abyssinian Knock. The last cat picture!
I stumbled across vroop.com while reading a little about daring fireball, which is the website for John Gruber (the creator of Markdown). Two people who care about the way software works in an intuitive, use-aesthetic sense. On Vroop I read mention of TiddlyWiki, a client-side "Personal Web Notebook" based on the whole Wiki shared document concept.
TiddlyWiki looks like it might be the non-linear thought processing application that I've been looking for. I often write stream of consciousness style, defining terms and grouping things as I go along. Usually this is a somewhat tedious task, requiring many passes to refine the core ideas. But the organic and self-organizing properties of Wiki, with the ability to automatically define entities by mashing WordsTogetherLikeThis, could provide me a way of writing and organizing on-the-fly.
This is interesting... a concise cheat sheet for Google searching. I consider myself a pretty good search engine jockey, but there were several tricks that I wasn't aware of, like date (searches within X months), define (shows definitions of a word found around the web), ~ (also searches for synonyms of the word, like ~car will find automobile, etc), and so forth. Via John Dowdell.
Here's another picture of Tommy, Mark's Russian Blue.
I finally got around to watching the 4 hour miniseries, Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. And now, the series is officially over. It was a good run, with some of my favorite characters ever in a series. Sigh.
I'm looking forward to the new Sci-Fi channel series, Battlestar Galactica, which picks up after the excellent mini-series pilot. Sure, there's some iffy elements, such as the suddenly-human Cylons. At least they're supermodels. But the human element was surprisingly poignant...it's kind of like The West Wing meets Rat Patrol. Uh, in a good way. John Olmos (you may remember him as the brooding chief from Miami Vice) is an awesome Adama. And surprisingly, the new Apollo and Starbuck (shown right) are pretty cool.
