David Emery Online

Web fonts — where are we?

With all the talk about web fonts, I think it’s time I tried to outline the present situation. I’ve not attempted to do so before, owing to the complexity of some of the material, and the speed at which things are moving.

A very useful writeup of the current state of using embedded fonts in web pages. The webfont proposal sounds interesting to me, although I don’t really see what it’s adding on a practical note as it looks straight forward enough to tamper with the metadata. On a pragmatic note though; if that’s what the foundries want we should give it to them, so hopefully we can start making some progress.

I wonder if they’ve considered watermarking as an alternate solution – I imagine that with the kind of data that makes up a OpenType font file it would be fairly easy to embed enough information – without visibly altering the font – to make tracing who has a licence for that particular file (and what sites it’s licensed for) simple. Most of the benefits of .webfont, without having to implement a new format.

Also, it’s interesting they mention that EOT is as good as dead, while simultaneously hyping up TypeKit – I’m fairly sure that they feed IE EOT versions of their fonts…

Location Now Built-In To Google Maps — In Chrome And Firefox

If you are using either Google Chrome 2.0+ or Mozilla FireFox 3.5+, you’ll now notice a little dot in the upper left-hand corner of Maps, just above the Street View guy. If you click that dot, Google Maps will show you your location on the map. It does this using the W3C Geolocation API standard

Very nifty – it works exactly like the location finder on the iPhone Google Maps app, and seemed to find me pretty accurately. Here’s hoping that it gets adopted in Safari fairly sharpish…

Prowl

Prowl is a Growl client for the iPhone. Notifications from your Mac can be sent to your iPhone over push, with a full range of customization and grace you expect.

This is pretty darn cool – an easy solution for twitter direct message notifications on your phone (if your client supports it) amongst many, many other things. It also has a perl script for passing it direct notifications without using Growl, which means you can do server side notifications to your phone which is superawesome. Very tempted to whip up a Textpattern plugin to do comment notifications…

The State of the Web

Nearest Tube Augmented Reality App for iPhone 3GS

It looks a bit shaky, but as a working proof of concept it’s startling – we are living in the future (how exciting!):

Social Media Icons

A set of standardised icons for popular social networking services and tools.

Having had to make a couple of these only a week ago this is very timely – lovely work and very useful…

Modernizr

Modernizr is a small and simple JavaScript library that helps you take advantage of emerging web technologies (CSS3, HTML 5) while still maintaining a fine level of control over older browsers that may not yet support these new technologies.

How handy – I’m using assorted CSS3 features all over the place these days so this goes straight into the toolkit. Although, I’m not too keen on the HTML5 enabler functionality – it’s not really good enough to require JS to be able to style certain tags, is it?

Fix Outlook

Microsoft have confirmed they plan on using the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010. This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more. […] Let’s use Twitter to send a clear message to Microsoft.

The campaign itself I’m not too fussed by (although we do send HTML emails at work, but if those emails don’t look nice in Outlook – and they work in Gmail/Hotmail – then that’s Outlook’s problem), but the site itself is pretty nifty with its real-time aggregation of Tweets. It reminds me of what we did on the Albert Hammond Jr. site, although doing via Twitter is pretty cool and something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now (probably using Twivatar just to make it easy).

(Via Ben Ward)

Nearby on Your Phone

We’ve always liked the idea of showing you photos taken in a particular place […] Today we’re bringing that ability to the smartphone mobile site. For those devices that support it (currently Android and the iPhone with the new 3.0 software), the Mobile Nearby page will figure out where you are in the world and show you photos that have been taken in the same area.

I had forgotten that the version of Safari that ships with iPhone OS 3 has location services built in, which is pretty darn awesome. Location services are the next big thing, and this is one of the key enablers.

Fever° Red hot. Well read.

Your current feed reader is full of unread items. You’re hesitant to subscribe to any more feeds because you can’t keep up with your existing subs. Maybe you’ve even abandoned feeds altogether. Fever takes the temperature of your slice of the web and shows you what’s hot.

I’ve been waiting for Fever for a while now as I’m very much still in a RSS reader wilderness, and Bloglines is definitely getting worse not better. Sadly though Fever doesn’t quite look like what I’m after, although it does look beautiful – I’m not too interested in the ‘Fever’ Digg-style personal recommendation thing, and the rest of the reading experience looks like it’s not quite what I’m looking for (see the link above for my rather particular feature set I’m after).

However, I’m not 100% sure that it’s not what I’m after but I can’t tell as there’s no live demo, and there’s no way I’m going to put down $30 without having a go first. I have absolutely no problem with adopting a desktop-app style model (pay upfront and install yourself) for web software but a key part of that is being able to try it first. Can anyone who’s bought Fever tell me whether it meets the list of criteria here?

Seriously considering writing my own one at this point, but that’s probably more hassle then it’s worth…