The historic art of typography and the Web. Will the two ever meet in harmony? My bet says -- given time, incremental advances, and plenty of creative hacking -- yes. And today, I was pleased to read about two such incremental advances. According to Anne Van Wagener of Poynter Online, Microsoft plans to introduce six new typefaces, geared especially toward Web use and on-screen viewing, in conjunction with Longhorn. Looking at the faces, one wonders whether their team was inspired by the folks over at Emigre. Also good news, a member of Microsoft's Internet Explorer development team has indicated that IE7 will bring with it full support for alpha channel transparency in PNG files as well as improved CSS standards compliance.
Technology: April 2005 Archives
The Adobe acquisition of Macromedia is still baffling to me. An interesting piece by John Dvorak surmises that the purchase was partly driven by fear. Also, John Gruber chimed in recently with a helpful translation of Adobe's FAQ regarding the acquisition.
So I was going head-to-head with Microsoft. I had a Word document on my Mac which had been corrupted during the last save procedure. And I had several hours of editing and notes which had been put into the document.
Pain. Grief. And so much more.
How to find a solution? Process of elimination -- beginning with a return to the superior Word 2003 on a Windows PC.
I openend and saved in Word 2003 and then tried opening again in Word on my Mac. No good -- just the spinning beach ball and one of my Mac's two G4 processors eaten alive as Word spun out of control. Back to the drawing board. Tried saving to an older Word file format. Tried an RTF. Tried stripping the document of the endless corrupted styles that had somehow multiplied. Tried stripping the document of all formatting. Tried deleting the first half of the document. Tried deleting the second half of the document. Tried deleting all of the text in the document. Still, nothing.
Then, at last, two solutions emerged: First, saving the Word file into an XML document, opening the XML document, and then saving into a new Word file did the trick. But because this approach still made me a little nauseous, I did the unthinkable and discovered helpful documentation on Microsoft's knowledge base. In the document on "Troubleshooting damaged documents in Word for Windows," I found out that "Word for Windows associates a wide variety of formatting with the last paragraph mark, especially section and style formatting." Thus, copying the entire document into a new file, except for the last paragraph mark, did the trick.
Disturbing. Disappointing. But dodged the bullet, gratefully, for now.
I'm genuinely stunned. In a surprise announcement this morning, Adobe Systems Incorporated informed the world that it will be buying longtime fiend-competitor Macromedia, Inc. in a stock trade deal valued at $3.4 billion. While Macromedia has been perceptibly stronger in creative markets that are linked to the Web, there is significant overlap between the two companies -- for example, Illustrator vs. FreeHand, GoLive vs. Dreamweaver, the now-defunct LiveMotion vs. Flash, and Photoshop vs. Fireworks. It will be interesting to watch as Adobe decides which products to keep and where to blend interfaces and features. We're talking about two radically different worlds, especially as it relates to user interface and creative process approaches that the companies have forged.
Blogger and I are not on the best of terms.
Paul Graham points to the migration of the best hackers he knows to the Macintosh platform. In summary, "The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?"
I happened across a fascinating interview with long-time Macintosh software developer Jonathan Wolfgang Von Rentzsch. In summing up his perspective on software development for Mac OS X, Rentzsch pointed out that, "Cocoa is simultaneously underrated and overrated. Underrated in that it really is the best application framework out there, single-platform nature, warts and all." He continued:
Overrated in that Cocoa is just a framework. It's a great one, sure. But your nontrivial app is guaranteed to hit something that Cocoa doesn't handle, and that means you're going to write code. And you're going to have to know your problem domain backwards and forwards, and figure out how to extend Cocoa cleanly, which often involves exploratory coding.
Cocoa won't do all your work for you -- you're still going to have to be a great programmer to write great software.
The complete interview is some good, in-depth reading for the technically inclined.
