You know you’re working too slowly when the annual bingo episode of the French TV show for teens for which you used to write the fan page passes by not once but twice without your second book published.

(Now UPDATED elsewhere)   Well, there are sometimes periods in which I never fail to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, and Blind Justice is one of them. I missed the first three episodes of this new Steven Bochco police drama, which is like every other Bochco police drama save for the fact that the hero of our story is blind. Yes, a blind cop. Now you’ve heard everything, right? [continue with: ‘Blind Justice’ Watch →]

I posted a comment on Tom Coates’s site warning that his charming and delightful proposals for social software for TV viewing would end up being inaccessible unless people tried very, very hard. Tom replied via snatchmail that I should write something that could then be linked and shown around.

So here it is. [continue with: Accessible social software for set-top boxes →]

The TVGuardian is a closed-caption decoder that pre-reads upcoming pop-on captions and, if selected, attends to swearwords and other “offensive” speech. The decoder then mutes the audio and rewrites the captions with inoffensive words. (In some cases, it simply doesn’t show a caption.)

I have no problem with this in principle. You aren’t altering the original work you’re watching; you’re merely altering its rendition on your television set at that particular moment. You, or anyone else in the room, can revert to the original easily by pressing the button that doesn’t look like a button on the TVGuardian unit – the one marked “TVG” – until CC1/Off pops up.

I have no problem with this even though the kind of people who would spend all that money on a device like this are invariably the same kind of people who consider me a sinner and want me made illegal. (Or they’ll just bide their time till the Rapture, at which point I will simply not join them in heaven, and they will pretend to be saddened.)

En tout cas, the makers of the TVGuardian – not coincidentally, they’re in Arkansas – sent me a snatchmail asking about certain issues, and, as ever, I was all too happy to help them out. They offered me an eval unit, and I accepted.

Now, when you get a machine that claims to filter out swearwords and turn movies for grownups into movies for uptight Christian-fundamentalist schoolchildren, what’s the first thing you do?

You run South Park through it, of course. [continue with: ‘Bottoms of Fire’ →]

Would everyone please stop linking to that Poynter article by Anne Van Wagener about the upcoming Microsoft ClearType fonts?

First of all, while I cannot claim to have broken the story, I was there weeks in advance, as dedicated readers will be aware.

Van Wagener’s article is so full of mistakes that even her correction has a mistake. Let’s get fisking!

the structure and the clarity of the letter forms. Basically, that means a story will be easier to read because the letters and words won’t be as soft and mushy looking.

That’s not what it means at all. You don understand that antialiasing is blur, which is “soft and mushy[-]looking”?

The Microsoft collection includes two serif, three sansserif, and a monospaced face

two serif and three sansserif faces, and a monospaced face

If you’re using a Mac, like me, you may have already figured out that these new fonts usually won’t work on your machine.

Of course they will.

The fonts can be viewed on Macs only if the operator of a Web site has licensed them for embedding or if an individual user has licensed them for personal use.

What, if anything, are you talking about here?

Microsoft has announced no plans whatsoever to distribute the ClearType fonts to “the operator of a Web site” or to individuals.

Although it’s not likely that many sites – or individuals – will take such costly steps,

because Microsoft shows no indications of making it possible.

I hope you’ll keep reading. These fonts are worth looking at regardless of platform – and you never know when someone will take your baby away and replace it with a PC.

Only out of my cold, dead fingers.

Helvetica. It is also the one typeface in the collection that is appropriate for use both in text sizes and larger headline sizes.

That’s rather broad.

Calibri is a sans serif with soft rounded corners. It has a warm, friendly personality that isn’t found in fonts like Arial and Helvetica. It is also the one typeface in the collection that is appropriate for use both in text sizes and larger headline sizes.

In Microsoft’s promotional booklet, Now Read This, Calibri’s designer Lucas de Groot says, “Its proportions allow high impact in tightly set lines of big and small type alike.”

It’s Luc(as) de Groot.

Candara is my least favorite of the six typefaces. One feature of this “informal sans serif” is a “slight flare” of the stems, or vertical strokes. The stroke is reminiscient of calligraphic forms, which I find to be less reader friendly.

You’re saying, for example and by comparison, that Optima is “less[-]reader[-]friendly”?

Consolas is a monospaced typeface, like Courier, that is used mostly in programming environments. The main characteristic of a monospaced face is that all the letters are the same width, as they were on old typewriters.

The defining characteristic.

If Candara is my least favorite, then Constantina is my favorite. It’s really a beautiful typeface that is very clean and readable.

Ah, yes, the use of the word “clean” to describe a typeface. Always a sign of typographic acumen.

Also: Are you not talking about a different typeface? Watch your ns.

Designer John Hudson says, “I would be thrilled to see Constantia being used for both the print and electronic media versions of a publication. Until recently, it has not been possible to use the same typefaces in print and electronic media without compromising either the readability or the attractiveness of one or the other.”

Um… Georgia and Miller? John, you know better.

And didn’t Van Wagener just finish name-dropping Arial and Helvetica?

Designer Jeremy Tankard describes Corbel as “less cuddly, more assertive.” This sans serif would be a nice alternative to Arial, Trebuchet or Verdana.

Arial’s getting a lot of press here. I thought we were talking about fonts that are not abominations.

More and more content is being viewed on a screen. From computer monitors to PDAs and cell phones, reading comfort is a big issue. If type isn’t easy to read then people won’t visit sites or buy the devices.

Demonstrable only in extreme cases. People will put up with anything.

In late Novemember 2004, Poynter brought together type designers
to talk about the future of onscreen reading. To read about the conference click here.

“Click here”– a sure sign of acumen in Web development.

Also, what month is “Novemember”?

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article reported incorrectly that these new fonts could not be displayed on Macs. In fact, they can be – but only if the operator of a Web site has licensed them for embedding or if an individual user has licensed them for personal use.

See above. The correction is still incorrect.

…then you have A Hate-On for Arial. Go forth and vent.

Plus a sort of folk-art version of Helvetica. Perfect!

Returning to Austin after a break of a year, I was reminded that I quite like the place, with its functional downtown and a citizenry whom many of us would recognize as people rather than as stereotypical Americans. (My mental image of any American city always starts out with a climate of fear, a total dependence on driving, nothing for me to eat, a potential for gaybashing, and a certain echt-mainstream cultural taste. Only some parts of Austin are like that. And I’ve never seen so many buses running late at night on a weekend.) As a bonus, Austin features hundreds of neon signs, and not a single such sign that I saw was tacky.

I attended South by Southwest Interactive Festival and appeared on two panels, Does Design Matter? and the Accessibility Shootout. I brilliantly scheduled the takeoff of my return flight during the Shootout, which I of course had to fix.

[continue with: Austinism →]

Liveblogging a panel at South by Southwest 2005 (SXSW2005; SXSWI) with John Halcyon Styn, John d’Addario, Amelia G (sic); 2005.03.15 16:08

I walked in late, having just presented at the Accessibility Shootout. Naturally I would walk immediately into the porn panel. I just had to meet Jonno, finally.

Jonno: It relates to the guiding principle I use to anything (the Golden Rule). If I had a personal sex video that was hacked from my Sidekick, I wouldn’t want blogs talking about it. Some of my friends use affiliate programs; Fleshbot doesn’t. Doesn’t that affect your editorial? Styn mentions that Jonno could be getting half the money from the signups caused by links from Fleshbot. “There’s a certain amount of objectivity to what I write about.” Some sites see traffic from Fleshbot and buy a banner, leaving him in “a sticky position” later: Is he writing about them because he wants to keep them as an advertiser?

Styn: Have advertisers pressured you? Jonno: Yes. All Gawker sites do the “advertiser salad toss” – a weekly post listing the advertisers that week. “ ‘We’re paying $400 a month for a tile ad. I see you did a spotlight on Blue Blood – why can’t we get the same treatment?’ I don’t like all my advertisers, quite frankly.” Question from audience: Does Gawker Media (that is, Denton) ever call you about advertiser pressure? No.

But he probably wouldn’t do the weekly advertiser wrap-up if he didn’t have to; it seems too much like paying for editorial.

Styn asks audience if anybody has a goal to work in or on any adult site whatsoever; none do. “You can talk about porn in restaurants as long as you avoid salad-tossing talk, or activities.”

Amelia: “When people won’t pay for things that are really [needed] for them, they will pay for smut.”

Jonno: “You can lie, cheat, steal… but you can’t cheat about what turns you on, what gives you that little frisson [or whatever].” “I am sort of of the belief that you shouldn’t have to pay for porn, and I’m glad that a lot of people I care about” are making that possible, and Fleshbot links to them. “For the casual porn fan, I don’t think you have to pay, but when it comes to the realm of the sort of more-niche content,” you do.

Jonno will link to sites that steal other sites’ photos if the source is a large corporation, which he sees as not as bad as taking money out of the pockets of the “more personal” porn sites. Amelia says it’s more important to get credit for what she did rather than to get paid.

Jonno has 724 DVDs unopened at his house. If anyone with a Weblog here would like to guest-review a title on Fleshbot, mail him with “your approximate flavours.”

Question about content filters on one guy’s dreamed-of erotic-fiction site. Amelia says to place things inside folders that are not linked at the homepage, which does not make the tiniest bit of sense whatsoever. Also stay away from the classic swearwords. Or use a subdomain. Or make a password-protected site whose password is listed right on the page.

Jonno says Gawker “give[s] me a pretty long leash… apart from the occasional frantic IM from Nick Denton when a celebrity sex tape breaks with ‘Are you blogging this? Are you blogging this?’ ”