dense: May 2005 Archives

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May 31, 2005

Cézanne is alive!

The innovative font foundry P22 has announced Cézanne Pro, an improved version of its popular Cézanne font. Cézanne Pro makes use of powerful OpenType features: Letter shapes change randomly, making the font look less homogenous. A text written in Cézanne Pro will give the human eye the illusion to be actually hand written. This shows how far typography has developed in the past couple of years, following the desktop revolution. Unfortunately, most of modern typographic features are still limted to print technologies, since the web has not found a solution yet for practical typographic freedom.

OpenType is a technology standard founded by Adobe, Microsoft and Montotype. So far, only Adobe Software such as InDesign makes use of OpenType, whereas Quark Xpress is still ignoring its powerful typographic features.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 06:08 AM | Comments (0)

iPhone or SkypePod?

Engadget picked it up from The Wireless Weblog. Apparently Skype had enough of dealing with reluctant phone companies and hesitant network vendors:

Skype CEO Niklas Zennstrom announced the company plans to put out a VoWLAN phone, which will allow customers to connect to the Skype voice network via WiFi. Not too many specifics were given, other than that it’ll be out later this year. Let’s hope they inject it with a little more style than Vonage’s retro-cell aesthetic employed on the UTStarcom F1000, their first offering in the WiFi phone department.

To pull this off, what Skype needs to do right is simple and twofolded. One, they need to make an excellent phone with seamless software/hardware integration. Just like the iPod . Two, they need to be able to create an enormous hype within three to four years, just like the iPod did. Hold on a second.—"Mr. Jobs? There is a phone call for you from Mr. Niklas Zennstrom?.."

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 05:41 AM | Comments (0)

May 30, 2005

Think dense

For about three months I have been working on updating my website. It's been a work with lots of interruptions, mostly work in advertising and a couple of design jobs for friends. Equally abandoned was core, the blog. Not that I would run out of topics. I had to smile when I just stumbled over older entries, written in the heat of the last elections in the U.S. In the meantime my Powerbook's hard disk died and I a total of about 30% of my entire data, including pictures and music. My visa for the U.S. ran out. I had to go back to Zurich, where I'm now living with my brother for the next couple of weeks, possibly months. And still I'm looking for a permanent position in the U.S. as a Creative Director, ideally in internet business. In short, I simply didn't find the time to write anymore.

Once the heat had boiled down a little, I didn't waste time. This weekend I finally made progress on the site, establishing a new entry page with changing pictures and cleaning up the blog's interface. The blog has a new name, dense, which somehow emphasizes what core is all about.

The new core blog dense will cover all sorts of topics just like it previously did, but I will focus more on core related topics, such as design, usability, conceptual work and the entire internet experience. My last job as an internet consultant opened my eyes to what I had always assumed: This business needs a lot of work to follow up with the evolution of the web.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 09:48 AM | Comments (0)

May 22, 2005

Big Google is watching you

Seattle Times Columnist Charles Bermant tells you about Gmail, Google's new email service. It's known that Google scans your email.

There are a lot of reasons some people will hate this, on principle. It is an invasion of privacy, a sneaky way to sell you something, proof that no matter how hip a company may seem, when they get a little success, they start acting like Big Brother.

I conclude with Bermant on the relevance of this issue. Google's search engine algorythms are applied to my email. So what? Sure I like privacy. But seriously, do you really believe you've got privacy when you're surfing the web?
When the web received the omnipotent label e-commerce not so long ago, and everything was about "Cool... But how do I make money with it?", everybody was concerned about Cookies. They were considered extremely bad, spies on your hard disk, little agents that check your user behaviour and send back that information to the mothership, so next time you're visiting Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, you'll see banners based on that information about you. Bermant continues:

It also bears notice that the same scanning technology is what separates out the spam. And it's not like an actual person is reading our messages, sitting in a dark room and saying, "Charlie is writing about leather, so I'll just hook him up with the Coach Web page." It's done by a machine at the speed of light that doesn't take the time to examine daily minutiae.

There's no other notion but "What's the biggie" in this article. And that's how much of a matter it is--to me at least.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 01:43 AM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2005

As We May Think

Why did computers come to adopt the GUI as their primary mode of interaction, and how did the GUI evolve to be the way it is today?--A very interesting and deep historic overview of the GUI (graphical user interface). A must read for everyone who's interested in the foundation of Information Architecture and Usability.

Like many developments in the history of computing, some of the ideas for a GUI computer were thought of long before the technology was even available to build such a machine. One of the first people to express these ideas was Vannevar Bush. In the early 1930s he first wrote of a device he called the "Memex," which he envisioned as looking like a desk with two touch screen graphical displays, a keyboard, and a scanner attached to it. It would allow the user to access all human knowledge using connections very similar to how hyperlinks work. At this point, the digital computer had not been invented, so there was no way for such a device to actually work, and Bush's ideas were not widely read or discussed at that time. However, starting in about 1937 several groups around the world started constructing digital computers. World War II provided much of the motivation and funding to produce programmable calculating machines, for everything from calculating artillery firing tables to cracking the enemy's secret codes. The perfection and commercial production of vacuum tubes provided the fast switching mechanisms these computers needed to be useful. In 1945, Bush revisited his older ideas in an article entitled "As We May Think," which was published in the Atlantic Monthly, and it was this essay that inspired a young Douglas Englebart to try and actually build such a machine.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 07:14 AM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2005

Delete you

Blogs are great. I have not had the time and patience yet to dedicate a thought to my own blog every day. Instead I started another one called eveculture. I know. It's ridiculous considering the fact I'm overworked and stressed out. But the possibilities of this technology are endless, communication wise, and I feel a calling to use the instruments put in my hands.

The one thing that could spoil the whole experience, for the reader as well as for the author are those pingbacks and comments that contain nothing but fake email addresses of fake posts with advertising for gambling. I wonder what these guys were born with. They're intelligent enough to write scrawlers and programs to take advantage of this communication tool. But what's the purpose. Trying to imagine what the burnt brain of a gambler would work like, I really have trouble understanding this concept. If I'm a player, I know where to find the gates of hell. If I'm addicted to gambling, or I don't get the internet at all and I truly am looking for short term entertainment where the goal is to lose as much money as quickly possible, why would I look for that in the comments of a blog?

And Google, if you read my resume when I sent it to you and you actually entered this link to look up my website and you read this, please, do us a favor. Find a way to stop this madness. We know you can do it.

Note to myself: Think about the question wether you should leave comments open or close them for good in this blog. Option one means no feedback any longer. Option two means spam. Should you really give spam the power it doesn't deserve? You're so lame, texaspoker.com and alike.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 03:28 PM | Comments (0)