FontBook

July 25, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

Last Thursday FontShop released a new version of FontBook for iPad. As Jürgen Siebert writes, FontBook for iPad [is] not a book, but a typographic atlas which can be Facebooked and Tweeted, and with its 620,000 font samples the equivalent of 20 printed FontBooks. In app form it costs just $5.99/€4,99.

Fontbook 1

Related:

• Stephen Coles talks about it in his blog;

• Khoi Vinh loves it, and the Web Standardistas love it too;

• Jens Tenhaeff has written an extensive review of it.

At this point I really can’t wait to get an iPad. This app goes straight in my list of top apps to purchase.

Full-screen Web browsing

July 25, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Software

I agree, full-screen applications are cool. Even before Lion, even before the iPad, I wanted to be able at least to surf the Web in full-screen mode. You can see more content (especially if you have a good-sized monitor), you can read articles without distractions, and places like Flickr are a joy to browse. When I started my investigation some time ago, I found that, for example, Firefox and Opera have a full-screen mode, so I could resort to them, but I never really liked their interfaces. I had high hopes for Shiira, an open source browser based on the WebKit engine. Shiira’s implementation of full-screen browsing is cleaner and hides the application chrome completely. Sadly it appears that its development has been abandoned for a while now, and the last version available (2.3) is still buggy in many places. 

But then I found an interesting alternative. I already mentioned it time ago in my previous blog, but I think it’s worth a reminder: Plainview, by The Barbarian Group. I like it because it’s a lightweight application, it doesn’t suffer from feature creep, it’s based on WebKit, and most of all it works even under Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. I use it a lot on my trusty sidekick, the Power Mac G4 Cube — full-screen Web browsing on the 22″ Cinema Display is really a treat. I also use it as a sort of screen saver by pointing it to this page, which is an HTML5 clock by Icondesign that’s meant to be accessed with Mobile Safari on an iPad, but it looks good even on bigger screens. If you prefer another kind of clock, you can point the browser to Every Time Zone. In addition, I find the Associated Press Timeline Reader perfectly suited to the full-screen experience.

Also, Plainview has a presentation mode. From the FAQ:

What else does Plainview do?
Plainview has a presentation mode – so you can build a presentation of, say, 10 sites you’ve built, and then show them one by one. Skip to the next site by hitting a hot key. We use this a lot for our Dog and Pony shows. We fire up one site we’ve done. Browse around. Show it. Time to move on? Skip to the next site, without opening up a location bar. Seamless, beautiful presentations.

You can also save presentations, add bookmarks, import your bookmarks, exit full-screen mode, open multiple windows, and view Quicktime movies. And check out the slick way we manage popups! 

I’ll let you find out by yourselves about that ‘slick way’, but I really wish more browsers could do the same — it’s a nice detail. 

So, if your Mac doesn’t support Lion, and you’d like to enjoy some elegant full-screen browsing, my humble suggestion is that you give Plainview a try.

Lion’s futuristic and maddening upgrades

July 24, 2011
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

If you still haven’t updated to Mac OS X Lion and are collecting reviews, impressions and assorted literature on the subject because you want to be… psychologically prepared for the big jump, then you should definitely add Apple OS X 10.7 Lion roars with futuristic, and maddening, upgrades, by Andy Ihnatko for the Chicago Sun-Times.

I read the whole review constantly nodding in agreement with Ihnatko, especially where he talks about the maddening aspects of Lion in the section titled The Mac as a Big Honkin’ iPad: the stuff that doesn’t work. I already expressed my perplexity regarding the changes in the scrollbars in Lion after watching the demos by Craig Federighi at the WWDC keynote. I pointed out that borrowing from iOS in this particular instance — the look and behaviour of the scrollbars — wasn’t a particularly good idea. I wrote about it in a post in the Italian section of my blog, so let me translate and summarise that part for you:

When both Schiller and Federighi said that (I’m paraphrasing) scrollbars are ugly, scrollbars are no longer needed, I immediately knew where this was going. There’s nothing wrong with the scrollbars. They’re quite useful — to instantly give you a visual clue of the length of a document, of a Web page, or an approximate estimate of the number of items in a folder when you open it in a Finder window. The new solution, borrowed from iOS, which makes the bars appear when you move the pointer and disappear when you stop, might be visually attractive, but the immediacy is lost. It’s nitpicking, I know, but if the goal of a user interface, among others, is to make things easier for the user, then by having scrollbars always in place, you can convey information the user is able to see and process without the need to take any unnecessary action. A nudge to the mouse wheel, a tap on the trackpad, a slight touch on the Magic Mouse, albeit small, are always additional actions the user must carry out to obtain information he/she could already see with the ‘old-school’ scrollbars. 

Here’s what Andy has to say:

On the iPhone and the iPad, scroll bars are only visible when you’re actually scrolling. As with the iPad’s multitouch shortcuts, that’s a great idea because there’s really no alternative. The iPhone has a teeeeeeeeny little screen and iOS can’t afford to waste a whole column or row of pixels on a scrollbar.

There’s no such limitation with a Mac screen. Even the screen of 11” MacBook Air is perfectly functional. And yet, Lion hides scrollbars unless you’ve actually scrolling.

Can’t stand that.

Even when they’re actually visible, they’re much narrower and harder to see. […]

A scrollbar isn’t decorative fribble. It’s a fundamental element of a GUI. When I’m editing a document, for example, the position of the scrollbar’s thumb and its size instantly tell me two things: that I’m about halfway through the document and that there’s probably only three or four more screenfuls of text to read. All at a glance. Why force me to expend actual effort to get that information?

And don’t forget that a scrollbar is a functional element as well. I want to zap straight to a certain section. Well, thanks, Apple: you made this tiny coin-slot of an indicator a lot harder to grab onto. 

I’m glad I’m not the only one to be annoyed by that. I didn’t want to be too vocal about it because I haven’t actually used Lion, not even a beta, so mine was just an opinion out of observation, while Andy speaks from direct experience. Same goes for certain multitouch gestures like the ‘reversed scrolling’. But I won’t spoil you further — please go read the whole review, it’s really worth your time.