Posts Tagged ‘fonts’
Elements, Simplenote, and iPhone fonts
August 17th, 2010 at 11:18 pm
You’ve no doubt heard about Elements by now. It’s the latest iPhone plain text note-taking app. I learned about it this morning from Jesse Grosjean’s tweet.
The main features of Elements are:
- Syncing with your computer(s) via Dropbox.
- TextExpander support.
- Character/word/line counts.
- Choice of font, font size, colors in the display.
- A “scratchpad” for easy access to disparate bits of text.
As a Simplenote user, my interest in Elements was piqued by the Dropbox support and the font choice.
When it first came out, Simplenote’s big selling point was its automatic syncing to the cloud. You could create, edit, and view notes on either your iPhone or your computer. Changes made on one device were instantly synced to the other (assuming your iPhone had an internet connection). This was a big step up from the built-in Notes app, which synced to your Mail application (!?) on the Mac (and God knows what on Windows) when you connected to your computer via USB.
But as nice as Simplenote’s cloud syncing is, it isn’t especially flexible. Initially, you had to go to Simplenote’s website to access your notes on a computer. Later, when the Simplenote API came out, certain applications—most prominently Notational Velocity—began to sync with Simplenote’s cloud services. Which was fine if you were a fan of those applications, but not so fine if you weren’t. While I appreciate Notational Velocity’s design1, I already have a text editor running all the time and don’t need another one.
Dropbox support gives you the flexibility that Simplenote syncing doesn’t. When working at your computer, you can use whatever text editor you like: TextMate, BBEdit, TextEdit, Coda, Emacs, Vim, Ed—anything. This is why Jesse Grosjean is moving the Hog Bay fleet of apps to Dropbox from his SimpleText system. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Simplenote folks add Dropbox support in a future version—it’s just so much easier for the user.
Elements does its Dropbox syncing very well. When you first launch the app, it asks you for your Dropbox login credentials2 and then puts an “Elements” folder in your Dropbox folder. All your Elements files—and they are proper named files, not just runs of text that get their name from the first line—are synced to that folder. Save a file to that folder on your computer and it will soon appear in Elements on your iPhone.
Elements’ second selling point for me was the ability to choose the font. Don’t get me wrong; I love Helvetica, but there are times when a monospaced font is the proper choice. Tabular information, for example, is much easier to deal with in a plain text document when all the characters are the same width. This is especially true if that document is also going to be edited on my computer, where I always use a monospaced font in TextMate.
This is my one disappointment with Elements. Yes, it allows me to use Courier, but it doesn’t allow me to use Courier Bold, a font whose strokes are actually thick enough to read easily. Here’s an example of a tabular document in Elements using Courier:
OK, sure, you can read it, but the font is really frail looking. If I could only use the bold version of Courier, the display would be much improved, but there’s no Elements setting for font style.3
Also, if you look closely at that Courier document again, you’ll see that the columns don’t line up exactly; the lines with colons are a bit shorter, suggesting that the colon character isn’t as wide as the others. I don’t understand how this can be, but it’s something I’ve pointed out before, although in that case I was looking at hyphens and question marks being wider than other characters.
I’ve noticed that Courier’s column alignment changes with font size. The screen shot above is with the font size at 16 points. At 14 points, the alignment of the lines with colons is better, but the lines for the 50-meter breast stroke are a bit longer than the others
This is not, I believe, a problem with Elements. It’s a problem with iOS itself, either in its font display routines or in its font definitions. A further problem with iOS fonts is that its only monospaced choices are Courier and Courier New. I’ve complained about this before, but it bears repeating: Why isn’t Menlo on the iPhone? Apple seems to think monospaced fonts are only for programming, so why bother with them on a device you don’t program on? It should know better.
I seem to have gone a bit astray here. What was I talking about? Oh yes. Elements and Simplenote. Overall, I think Elements wins because of Dropbox and font choice. There are, however, two aspects of Simplenote that are superior and which the Elements people should consider adopting:
- Simplenote allows you to sort your notes by creation date, modification date, or name. Elements sorts by modification date only.
- Simplenote can recognize URLs, phone numbers, and dates and turn them into links to Safari, Phone, and Calendar, respectively. Elements can’t.
Simplenote did just announce that big changes are coming soon in a new version. Maybe that will flip the advantage back to it. Until that happens, Elements will be replacing Simplenote on my iPhone’s first screen.
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It reminds me of Casady & Greene’s QuickDex from the olden days, a program I dearly loved. ↩
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If you don’t already have a Dropbox account, it has a link that, I guess, sends you off to get one. But everyone uses Dropbox nowadays, don’t they? ↩
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I’ve asked Second Gear for a way to get Courier Bold in a future version of Elements, and its answer was quick, polite, and noncommittal. ↩
An iOS 4 disappointment
July 2nd, 2010 at 9:33 am
My biggest disappointment with iOS 4 isn’t the somewhat clumsy double-click required to use fast app switching, it’s the lack of a decent monospaced font.
Monospaced fonts are usually thought of as programmers’ fonts, but they’re helpful any time you need vertical alignment of plain text. Many of the files I keep in Simplenote are tables of information, and although I’ve come up with a half-assed way of getting the columns to nearly align, things would be so much easier—and more portable—if I could just switch to a monospaced font.
Yes, iOS 4, like its predecessors, does have a couple of monospaced fonts: Courier and Courier New. But no one really wants to use such ugly fonts. When Apple introduced Menlo with the release of Snow Leopard, I was really hoping it would be included in the next iPhone OS release. Unless the Fonts app is lying to me, that didn’t happen.
Back in the days when Inside Macintosh ruled the Apple programming world, there was a way for developers to ensure that certain fonts were available for their applications: they could include them in the resource fork of the app. I don’t know if a similar thing is possible with iPhone apps, but I’d jump to a note-taking app that had easy online syncing and a decent monospaced font.
Safari text rendering problem
June 28th, 2010 at 1:15 pm
I’ve been noticing recently that text is sometimes rendering poorly in Safari. At first, I thought it was deteriorating eyesight. Then I thought it was the Retinal display on my iPhone causing me to see pixels on every other screen. but now I’m sure there’s something else going on.
The problem seems most common when I’m reading RSS feeds in Google Reader. Reader uses a smaller font than I like, so I bump up the font size one step with ⌘+. Here’s a snippet of a post1 that rendered poorly earlier today but then rendered well when I returned to it later. The screenshot starts with the bad version and shifts to the good version when you roll your mouse over it.
Do you see the difference? Look in particular at the word “enactment” near the center of the image and at the two links. Once you see the difference in those places, you’ll start seeing it everywhere. Everything is just a little more pixelly in the bad version. It doesn’t seem like much, but it wears on you when reading long passages.
I don’t know what’s going on here. Obviously, the text isn’t always rendered poorly—otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to get the “good” screenshot—but it happens often enough to be noticeable.
I haven’t noticed this in any other program, just Safari. I can’t say it definitely started with the recent upgrade to Safari 5.0, but that’s my suspicion.
Update 6/29/10
My suspicion was wrong.
I’m pretty sure now the problem was an extra copy of Arial. I went into Font Book and saw the little yellow caution signs by all the Microsoft core fonts, indicating duplicate copies.
I used the Select Duplicated Fonts and Resolve Duplicates commands in the Edit menu, and the fuzzy text problem hasn’t arisen since.
Honestly, I’m sure I’ve removed duplicates of these fonts before; I don’t understand why they came back.
This was obviously a system-level problem and had nothing to do with Safari per se. Safari was the only application I saw it in because it’s the only application that uses Arial or the other MS core fonts.
Update 6/29/10
My belief that my suspicion was wrong…was wrong.
The duplicate fonts are gone, but the crappy looking text is back. Sometimes reloading the page fixes the problem, sometimes it doesn’t. I’m confused and annoyed.
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From Lawyers Guns and Money. ↩
Such a Mensch
June 22nd, 2010 at 11:15 am
It seems that Robey Pointer, one of the Twitter guys, has made some changes to Apple’s monospaced Menlo font. He calls the new(ish) font Mensch and has released it for all to use.1 Let’s take a look.
Menlo, as you may recall, is Apple’s redesign of Bitstream’s freely available Vera Sans Mono font. Here’s an alphabet of Menlo at 48 points. If you roll your mouse over the image, it’ll switch to Mensch. Roll back out and it returns to Menlo.2
The differences are:
- He’s replaced the slash in the zero with a dot, taking it back to the Bitstream form.
- He’s made the less-than and greater-than signs much broader.
- He’s gotten rid of the curly tail on the lower case l.
- He’s removed the baseline from the numeral 1 to make it more distinct from his new l.
- He’s put a curl in the lowercase q.
- He’s run the tail of the uppercase Q into the oval and made it thicker.
- He’s put a corner in the upper loop of the numeral 3.
- He’s rounded of the dots in the lowercase i and j and in the question mark and exclamation point.
- He’s closed off the upper loop of the ampersand.
I love the restoration of the dot in the zero. I’ve always thought to switch to a slash was a mistake, a surprising move to a more pedestrian look from the usually stylish Apple.
I’m not sure about the broader < and >. On the whole, it’s probably a good thing, because most people use those symbols as angle brackets and having them sized more like the other bracketing symbols will work well. But for those of us who still do math programming, having these symbols so much broader than the equals sign is going to be weird.3
The other changes, I must say, leave me cold. After such a promising start with the zero, the changes to the l, and the Q seem to be a step backward to the dull and ordinary. And although his q is quite good looking, I really prefer q to be a mirror image of p.
As for the 3, Robey says
Three is rendered in the gothic style, because the gothic style is clearly superior.
I like his bold declaration of preference even though I despise the preference itself.
Finally, rounding off the dots is another unfortunate shift to the prosaic. And an inconsistent shift, too, as he made no changes to the squared-off period and comma.
For completeness, here’s Vera Sans Mono with a Menlo rollover effect.
And finally, Vera Sans Mono with a Mensch rollover effect.
Although I’m sure many people will prefer Menlo or Mensch, I’m sticking with Vera Sans Mono.4
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Notice that Robey is taking advantage of webfonts and using Legitima as the body font in his blog. Nice. ↩
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I stole this idea from Jon Shea’s Menlo/Vera Sans Mono comparison. ↩
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When I was first learning to program (I’m still learning to program), math was far and away the most common use of computers. How things have changed. ↩
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Or DejaVu Sans Mono, which is Vera with more Unicode glyphs. ↩
Word up
April 12th, 2010 at 10:24 pm
My wife and I are taking over some local volunteer work from another couple, and last week I had to send out some information sheets on the program, a program description and a registration form. The previous volunteers emailed me their versions of the sheets, so it should have been a simple matter of replacing last year’s dates and contact info with this year’s. But I turned it into a bigger job than necessary.
The sheets came to me as .doc files. This didn’t surprise or even dismay me; .doc files are assumed, by people who have never worked on anything but Windows, to be the lingua franca of the computer world. Pages did a fine job of opening/converting the files.
It was after I opened the files that the desire to overdo started creeping over me. The registration sheet was basically a series of fill-in-the-blank lines:
Name: _______________________________________
Address: ______________________________________
Home phone: _____________ Cell phone: _____________
Age: _____________ Birth date: _____________
Like the mess above, items in the form were sort of aligned, but not really. A little poking around confirmed that “alignment” had been done with spaces, not tabs.
Should I fix it? The rational part of my brain said no. This is being sent to people who haven’t noticed the misalignment in the past and won’t notice proper alignment now. It’s a waste of time, I told myself. But I just couldn’t send something out so sloppy when I knew perfectly well how to fix it. Twenty minutes later—twenty minutes I’ll never get back—the document had left and right tabs and underscore tab leaders. Oh, and it had the new contact and date info, too. I generated a PDF of it and attached it to my outgoing email.
The program description sheet was more of a narrative and didn’t have any significant alignment problems. OK, it had some misaligned lists, and I did spend the time aligning them, but that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that it was set in—cue ominous music—Comic Sans.
Once again, the rational part of my brain told me to just update the text and send it off. Most people think Comic Sans is just fine; it’s the universal “fun” font. And as with the alignment, the audience for this flyer will not think any less of me for sending out a document set in Comic Sans. But I just couldn’t do it.
I kept the flyer fun and gave it kind of a Marvel look by using comic book fonts from Comicraft (if you follow that link, watch for the Kirby krackle). I changed the body text to Face Front and the headings to Battle Cry. I bought them, on a tip from Andy Ihnatko, during one of ComicCraft’s recent New Year’s Day sales and just love the way they look. The generated PDF includes the fonts, so the recipients (who won’t appreciate the authentic typography, the Philistines) will see the flyer just as I do.
Sadly, the font change is not a permanent improvement. When I hand over my files to next year’s volunteers, I’ll have to turn the font back to Comic Sans, because whoever takes over will certainly not have Face Front or Battle Cry on their computers. But the files I give them will have the improved alignment—my lasting legacy.
I wasn’t surprised at the poor formatting of the files I received. I helped my wife put together a grade school newsletter for a couple of years, and I saw the article submissions she got. Twenty years since The Mac is Not a Typewriter and fifteen since The PC is Not a Typewriter, most people still don’t know how to use a word processor.
And I don’t know how to stop making “improvements” that don’t matter.