Finishing off 2011 with the most fun radio interview I have ever done

Photo by Xavier Collin/Snapstar Live Friday morning’s interview with Sonia Sly on Kiwi Summer was the most fun I have ever had on radio.    Radio New Zealand National was the most fair and balanced medium I dealt with when running for Mayor of Wellington in 2010, and I was glad that Sonia thought of […]

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Speaking on typography and social media, with Retake the Net in between

Sometimes, a brand-new speech will give you some jitters, because the material’s unrehearsed. But I have to say I had a lot of fun today at Creative Camp at Natcoll in Wellington, organized by Kai König, Diane Sieger and their team, talking about typography and how we should be aware of it today. It was […]

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A few more swashes for JY Pinnacle Italic

JY Pinnacle Italic will be re-released as a Pro version shortly, and above are some of the extra characters we’ve added.    I know the swash k still needs work, and it will be fixed up by the time of release.    Pinnacle always had a decent bunch of ligatures, but if you have the […]

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Archæological evidence that QuickDraw GX existed

Here’s a glyph inside JY Integrity that never got used beyond the original publicity in the mid-1990s.    Before there was OpenType, there was QuickDraw GX, and I was part of the consortium trying to sort out the character set, along with Allan Haley and others. We were using this newfangled collaboration tool called the […]

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Google humour: the Helvetica search that doesn’t come out in Helvetica

[Cross-posted from Tumblr] Found via Chris Brogan: if you Google Helvetica, Google will deliver the results in your default typeface—in my case, Alia. (If you look at the Snap Shots thumbnails that pop up, they’re in Times.) It’s weird, because I thought a fun trick would be to deliver the results in Helvetica (which is, […]

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Fax and text spam: bad marketing moves

Above I’d mention the war, but Honda was founded after the surrender. I despise fax-spam, and under my reading of the Telecommunications Act, these come under nuisance calls. But regardless of the legality, it seems rather hypocritical for Honda to have sent me one for its Insight hybrid car.    Think about it: a lot […]

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No surprises as Firefox 4 reaches Beta 10

Tried Firefox 4 Beta 10 on another computer altogether—the new machine in the office. No font management software on this one, which rules out anything that could have been doing. I don’t need to say much more. The font problem is the same as on Betas 7, 8 and 9; and the fact that Google […]

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McAfee did good: a software company that didn’t jerk me around in ’10

A new computer arrived at the office, Firefox 3·6·13 was installed on it. Boom goes the dynamite (thanks, Jen—since I watch very little television I had no idea of this reference). It wasn’t the ‘unmark purple’ bug, either (sample size so far: 1).    It’s a different set-up to the rest. For starters, it has […]

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What the suck?

I think Telstra Clear’s Captcha for its Customer Zone is broken. I wish I took screen shots of each failed attempt now, since it’s kicked me off after five tries.    But this one was intriguing. I never expected to see a quaint s, especially in a context as digital as a Captcha, in usage […]

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What others write about their Firefox crashes; Chrome is the oddity with font-face

  It has been interesting reading the comments from other disgruntled Firefox users over the ‘unmark purple’ error (nsXULControllers::cycleCollection::UnmarkPurple(nsISupports*))—now that I can trace the majority of my crashes to this.    Yesterday, Mozilla’s Crash Reports’ site crashed (rather fitting), and today, the CSS wouldn’t load, which allowed me to read what others wrote on the […]

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