Thanks to all of those who attended the Imulus 3rd Thursday presentation on HTML5 last night. We had some great discussion and topic review. Today we’ve placed the presentation website live at http://html5.imulus.com.

Here are the additional links that got mentioned during the meetup.

• The League of Movable Type
• Font Squirrel @fontface typefaces
• Hot Shoo imagery
• Border Radius quick grab site

This should be everything that was covered, however, if you find something missing feel free to add a comment with a link. We’ll jump on it ASAP.

We spent much of Friday down at MATTER Studio collaborating on a t-shirt design, experimenting with the presses and exchanging ideas. Here are a few photos of our outing.

After installing Snow Leopard on my 15″ MacBook Pro a few days ago I noticed that fonts, specifically at low sizes, looked terrible. Edges where overly rugged and text seemed dim. In essence, it seemed as if every font had decreased an entire weight.

With further research I discovered that this is a problem with 3rd party (non-apple) monitors and their default status in 10.6. Previously in 10.5’s System Preferences users where able to alter Font Smoothing with one of several options:

Yet, in 10.6 the option has been replaced with a simple Use LCD Font Smoothing When Available dialogue. The problem is OS X 10.6 detects some 3rd party monitors (Dell, Samsung, Lenovo, etc.) as CRTs and doesn’t allow them to utilize font smoothing. Here’s an example side by side of font non-smoothing vs. smoothing on Snow Leopard.

Fortunately there is a way to force font smoothing via terminal, simply paste the following text and hit enter:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

• 0 – is the setting for CRT rendering (looks horrible on LCD)
• 1 – is the setting for Light
• 2 – is the setting for Medium (Best for Flat Panel)
• 3 – is the setting for Strong

Once you’ve set this you will want to log out and back into OS X. At this point all the fonts should look as they did before your upgrade to 10.6. Hoorah!

Update: Added another example from iTunes music selection that highlights this issue a bit more. Also, updated a grammar fix thanks to Reddit user guriboysf.

It’s amazing how many times we overlook the importance of usability with objects we encounter on a daily basis. Take for instance, coins. This seemingly simple object has basic usability elements which should be considered during the design process:

1. Weight. It makes no sense to carry a coins which are heavy and are burdensome to transport in a pocket.
2. Size. They need to be small enough so that many of them can fit into a pocket, yet large enough to be easily read.
3. Material. Should be durable enough to resist wear and tear, yet not expensive to massively reproduce.
4. Art. A good coin should say something about the country and the culture it comes from.

I’d also argue there is a 5th trait which somehow seems to be lost in a survey of coins. Accessibility.

Let’s look at American coins.

There is zero logic to the corresponding value of the coin and the size. But most importantly it lacks any numeric representation. A foreigner using American coins needs to either recognize the coin or read the English text to interpret it’s value. Compare this with the Euro, which clearly denotes the value of each piece.

From an accessibility standpoint, American coins are unfriendly. They lack the universal visual data to quickly understand the value of each piece. Since we’re undergoing all this “change” lately, why don’t we just take a moment to revamp all our coins as well. Let’s make a Yankee version of the Euro.

Once in a while you come across a script that makes your life dramatically easier. Today that script was sIFR Lite.

Over the past few months we’ve been working on a client project that requires us to use a specific typeface for page headings on the website. Rather than doing standard -9999px image replacement techniques, which would have made our intern want to gouge out his eyes with an ice pick, we decided to give the sIFR replacement technique a try. sIFR 2.0 is a technique that came out in mid 2005 and has been used by a limited number of sites. Well, as cool as it is I ran into quite a few problems when first implementing it with our project. And while I got it to work I felt slightly dirty about the implementation. Luckily a couple days later I saw a post on twitter by Matt Crest about a new solution called sIFR Lite.

Today, I finally had the chance to replace the old method with the lite version and I have to say it is exceptionally well done. Dave over at AllCrunchy.com has done a phenomenal job with his implementation of the sIFR technique. Making it lighter, easier to use, easier to install, and easier to manage. In fact, it reduces the amount of work by about 5x and in my tests it seems to render better. Better aliasing and better container size detection. Check out the example I whipped up.

Here’s the javascript code required to call sifr-lite:

window.onload = function () {
	var din = new Font('din.swf', {tags:'h1'});
	din.replace('h1')
}

Two quick notes: First, I do find that without using the window.onload function that in Safari sometimes the text won’t pick up color. This is very minor and easy to fix.. obviously. Second, you will need to use the original sIFR to create the .swf files of your font’s. Simply use the .fla and .as files that come with that script to make your fonts, then call those fonts via sifr.lite.js. For those looking for an all in one option I’ve put it together in a zip file. Please recognize I take no credit for the sIFR script or the Lite implementation of it, I simply thought it would be nice to have an all in one package to make things work.

Update: After further testing it seems that this technique is not yet compatible with Flash Player 10 except in Internet Explorer. Hence, if you’re running Flash 10 you won’t see the replacement technique. I hope this gets fixed soon as a fix is already out for sIFR 2.

Update 2: From our comments Gyo over at (http://www.giordanopiazza.com) has released an updated and fixed up version of sIFR Lite. I plan to start using this again for our projects. Very cool!