Extremely cool article previewing new fonts slated to appear in Longhorn. I really like fonts, as I have mentioned here previously.
I’m being reminded of what a design dilettante I am since I’ve been doing a bunch of explanatory diagrams and mockups at work recently (mostly using Fireworks). I’m hoping that we’ll get to show off one of the two big monster projects my team has been working on in a few weeks or so — we’re not quite there yet but things are starting to come together nicely.
I was randomly searching for some stuff for a little personal project I’ve been working on when I ran across "I Remain," an archive of digitized documents at Lehigh University. At first glance it looks like this dry historical repository — and it is — but the things the curators chose to include is pretty interesting. It’s all ephemera — condolence notes, thank-you cards, and so forth. It looks like a work in progress; maybe when it’s done it’ll be a slightly more highfalutin version of Found Magazine.
A lot of the items in the archive are from former Presidents and congressmen, which reminded me of this weird job I had in college, typing up the memoirs of H. R. Haldeman (Nixon’s right-hand man). Haldeman was big on the details, almost freakishly so. His memoirs were published posthumously in 1994, so Haldeman didn’t have the chance to go back and edit them or anything. What you got went pretty much straight from his Dictaphone through my fingers and onto CD-ROM.
The new Scottish Parliament building opened today, the first Scottish assembly in 300 years. The building is a pretty amazing piece of work — check out these photos. The window seat is particularly slick.
Mark Pilgrim summarizes the design debate within the Atom standards group with respect to globally-unique identifiers for content. They’re using URIs, which is an interesting choice, and not at all as simple as you might expect (when I confronted a similar problem with a content product I wrote a few years back, I used guids, because they’re easy to deal with on Windows; the Atom group examined and discarded guids — for good reasons, I think).
Bottom line, Atom will require that publishers (as opposed to clients) do the heavy lifting with respect to what a valid URI is. As Marc says:
Making publishers normalize the URI ahead of time takes away that surprise, and lets clients do what they thought they could do in the first place. You can’t do that with RSS. Really Simple Syndication is really only simple if you’re doing it incorrectly.
I like fonts. The good folks over at Bitstream made a family of fonts available to the open-source community. Normal mortals like us can download them for free and use them. (If you’re a l33t font hax0r, like my hero Mister Chank Diesel, you can even edit them and create derivative fonts of your own based on them.)
The only thing I’m picky about when it comes to editors is the way my monospace font looks. Courier and its derivatives are ass. The monospace font in the Vera family, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, is simple, but it’s much cooler than my previous favorite (Lucida Console). I have great eyesight but I usually turn the text in my editor up to 14 point because I’m more comfortable editing code at that size for some reason. Lucida Console is great-looking at 14 point, nice and thick but a little wide. Vera Sans is even better — it’s narrower, so you have less trouble with text scrolling off the right side of the window. Also, Vera Sans Mono puts a dot in the middle of the zero, just like the 3270 screen font does, so you can easily tell the difference between a zero and a capital O. The font also adds a nice subtle curve to the bottom of the lower-case L so you’ll never confuse it with the number 1. Mmmm, curvy.
Six foot tall Bender robot? Four thousand bucks? Sign me up.
