In LA

One of the free apps in Apple’s new “app store” for iPhone and iPod touch is “wordpress”. Looks like it is not only free, but nice.

Without me ever telling them my idea, they’ve set it up to post a mostly blank blog entry, and then snarf in the entry to extract the blog’s template. The app then uses the captured template to generate an accurate wysiwyg preview so you can evaluate your post before submitting. Nice.

I guess I don’t have to write my own iPhone blogging client now. This one will likely do.

If you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch user who would like to be able to input Chinese characters using handwriting recognition, today is your lucky day:

A screenshot of me using the HWPen input method to write one of the more important Chinese phrases in my iPod Touch’s “Notes” application.

It would appear that someone has ported the excellent HanWang Chinese handwriting recognition engine to the iPhone. This software can also do English handwriting recognition, but that doesn’t work nearly as well as the Chinese recognition. Details on how to install and use the software can be found on Gizmodo.

I have this installed and living just fine side-by-side with a Chinese pinyin input method, and it’s very easy to switch between pinyin, handwriting recognition, and the standard English keyboard.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Chinese, Chinese IME, Chinese Language, IME, iPhone, iPod, OS X, software

Aesthetically, this clone of an Apple iPod Touch, advertised on Facebook’s China network, looks like the closest match yet, though its dimensions are not listed so it’d be tough to say for sure.

Other notable iPod Touch clones are the Optimus Touch, the Tsinghua Tongfang PMC-V560 (apparently only costs $52), the Portronics/Onda VX858, and the Meizu M7.

Of course, these are all just lookalikes, I’d expect they lack the features that make the iPod Touch so appealing –great multitouch interface, high resolution, robust Unix OS, great email application, great web browser, etc. But it’s amusing to me to watch the number of Chinese iPod Touch clones increase.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, OS X

Because I was switching between Windows and OS X, and was trying to make the text on a web page look nice, I was a little riled up when I wrote my last post about Microsoft Windows XP’s technique of rendering fonts. Now that my mental dust has settled, I still think Windows goes about font rendering in an ass-backwards way, but I can better articulate why that is, and how I think they got there.

I think the Windows font rendering method is designed specifically to make each character as clear and sharp as possible. I think the engineers who designed Windows XP’s typography engine did a great job accomplishing this task. The trouble with engineering is that it’s possible to come up with a great answer to the wrong problem. In my opinion, that is what happened here. The real problem with text on a computer is not clarity or sharpness, but readability.

The challenge of rendering fonts well on low-resolution screens is that fonts are full of curves and thin lines that just don’t line up exactly with the screen’s coarse grid of individual pixels. OS X and Windows both use sub-pixel rendering, so portions of characters that don’t land exactly on a screen pixel are rendered in shades of gray to represent how much of that pixel is covered by the font¹. In order to make each character look as clear and sharp as possible, Windows alters the shape of characters to optimize the amount of each character that lands exactly on screen pixels and minimize the number of pixels that will be rendered as anything but black.

This definitely gives many characters a sharper look in Windows. Many instances of this can be noted in the images from my previous post, one obvious example is that Windows has taken the curved-top, bottom, left, and right edges of all lowercase ‘a’s and has straightened them so that they render as single and sharp lines of pixels at right-angles to one another. In comparison, the OS X rendering of the lowercase ‘a’s looks blurry and curvy.

But the trouble is, characters do not stand alone. Typographers for hundreds of years² have taken great pains to design fonts so that the shape of characters, placed next to one another, produces well shaped words and sentences optimized for ease of reading. A well-designed font leads the eye through words, and the shape of the characters and the spacing between letters is crucial. The Windows font rendering engine changes fonts so thoroughly in order to maximize contrast that it warps them into shapes that barely resemble the original font (again, see those lowercase ‘a’s as a good example of this), and it also shifts portions of the fonts left and right such that the width of characters and the space between characters varies inconsistently, not just within within a line of text but even within individual words (note that in the Windows rendering of the word ‘event’ in the example image, there is a lot of space between the characters ‘e’ ‘v’ ‘e’, but ‘e’ ‘n’ ‘t’ are closer to each other).

The Microsoft engineers I know are very smart people, and I know Microsoft does a ton of usability studies, so how could they get this one so wrong? I suspect the wrong questions were asked. Perhaps test subjects were asked to look at blocks of text and rate their clarity and sharpness, or were asked to look at blocks of text rendered using different methods and were asked to judge the appearance of the text. Although I think the OS X method of font rendering is superior for the criteria that matter, I do think that when placed side by side with a block of text rendered by Windows and asked which block has the greatest clarity, many people would say the text in Windows looks clearer. And of course it does, there’s less gray, and those subjects might also be used to the look of non-antialiased fonts or bitmap fonts (especially at the time Windows XP was in development).

But the more important question to ask would be, “Which font rendering method produces more readable blocks of text”. And the way to test the question would be to take two groups of people with good reading skills who do not frequently read text on a computer, have each group read a 20-page story rendered on each computing platform, and time them. I contend that the OS X group, regardless whether they rated the text as clear or unclear, would finish reading first³. The reason being that OS X renders the fonts much more accurately, and since body fonts are carefully designed to be readable when typeset as words in paragraphs, the Windows tendency to mangle each character out of shape and out of harmony with its surrounding characters in order to maximize the clarity of individual characters turns out to be counterproductive. And butt-ugly IMO.

Ask the wrong questions, and you often wind up with answers like “42″ and font rendering engines like the one built into Windows XP.

1. both OS’s also leverage the fact that LCD displays are high-resolution arrays of red, green, and blue pixels, and render not just levels of gray but colored pixels in order to use this additional resolution –Microsoft calls this technology cleartype and OS X doesn’t give it a name [↩]
2. thousands actually, we still use fonts such as “Trajan”, based on Roman typography [↩]
3. and would probably suffer from less eyestrain, but that wouldn’t be as easy a thing to test objectively [↩]

I’m building a web page right now, and am testing it on a number of web browsers on a few different computing platforms. After staring at type on computer screens for a while, I have reached the conclusion that font rendering on over 90% of computers out there is incredibly bad. Here’s an example:

Which do you prefer? Be honest now. OK, so maybe it’s not fair to compare the rendering of a font on a computer screen with a scan of actual printed type. And maybe it’s wrong to pick on Windows without offering up an example of how text is rendered in Mac OS X or Linux. Surely all computers have huge limitations when rendering the printed word. But actually I’m being more unfair than that. Please take another look at those examples, compare them, then click here to reveal the real captions for the above images to find out where they actually originated. (If you prefer the deceptive captions, you can reload ‘em).

To my eyes, OS X’s type rendering looks much like a scan of a newspaper or book. The weighting of characters is nice and even, and the text is pleasing to the eye and easy to read. Even if you didn’t buy the pretense of the original caption, it’s at least slightly possible to pass the OS X rendering off as something that was actually typeset and printed at high resolution.

Windows XP’s font rendering is an indefensible monstrosity.² It pains me to think that over 90% of the personal computers in the world, in the year 2008, display text in this manner³. The characters in the Windows sample have very uneven weighting, with all corners and pointy details stabbing my eye with a couple pixels of absolute blackness while curves are rendered an anemic gray and straight lines are often reduced down to a single pixel in width (This problem jumps out at me in almost every letter, but can be seen more clearly in the sharp “J” next to the soft “o” in Jonathan, in the oddly sharp lower left corner of the lower-case “a”, and in the weird unevenness of the italics and the numerals). The best that can be said for the kerning is that it is bizarre; Letters are either smashed too close together or separated by chasms, within a single word. Italics are so awful in so many ways that I’m thinking of redesigning my pages to avoid using them altogether –Windows users have to suffer enough with regular text. Some characters look strangely condensed.

A few details to note: compare Windows’s rendering of the word “sweeping” to its rendering of the word “events” (why so much space between the instances of “e” and “v”?), then compare Windows’s renderings of the word “events”, “Rhys”, “1930’s”, “Children” to the OS X versions. And why are the OS X and Windows renderings of these lines so different in their relative lengths?

I’m sure there are compelling-sounding engineering reasons behind Microsoft’s assault on typography-loving eyes everywhere, but the proof is in the pudding. Both of these samples are of the same font, Georgia (designed specifically for Microsoft), and it is either Alanis-ironic or just plain sad that OS X kicks Windows’s ass so soundly at rendering Microsoft’s own. Another few hours of flipping between platforms and I’ll be compelled to file a shareholder resolution to push Microsoft to fix their font render engine, undergo a few sessions of maoist self-criticism, and make a public apology.

Windows, heal thyself, particularly thy crap-ass rendering of typography

1. If only there were a recognized acronym for “rolling on the floor hemorrhaging out my eyeballs” [↩]
2. And I’m being charitable. If you are even entertaining for a moment the idea of defending the crappy font engine built into Windows XP, please first revisit the sample images above and start building up your reserves of purest denial. [↩]
3. actually, it’s worse than that, since most Windows users don’t know to enable cleartype [↩]

My first thought upon seeing the name of this product was that finally former two-time heavyweight champion George Foreman had had enough with the iPod craze, and was now selling a grill designed specifically for frying iPods to death, with a sales pitch along the lines of:

The non-stick surface makes it easy for Georgetta to remove well-done iPods from the grill. Any melted white plastic drips down the center channel of the angled grill and into the removable tray for easy cleanup by George VI.

It turns out that my first guess was completely wrong. Here’s part of the actual product description:

The unique appliance not only grills, but it can also provide music to help set the mood–whether romantic or fun and festive during a party. For music capabilities, the unit comes equipped with a 10-watt speaker and the ability to be used with an iPod or MP3 player.

I’ll readily concede that there may be one or two people out there who would really like a large indoor-outdoor electric grill that can also play music, but I’m convinced that the very existence of the George Foreman iPod Grill is a sign that the end is near.

Technorati Tags: Apple, buy.com, cooking, iPod

I don’t have the data to back this up, and am too lazy to gather it, but it feels to me as if the value of Apple’s shares plummet every time they announce a new product, only to recoup their value over the course of the next month.

It appears that I’m not the only person to have noticed this pattern.

The new Macbook Air. Tiny. Great for businessfolk on the go. I wish I could use it, but it’s not an option for me or many other media professionals due to the fact that it cannot be connected to audio and video devices over firewire, lacks gigabit ethernet, and has an Intel integrated graphics chipset. Here’s a more detailed list of my thoughts.

The Great

• Really really tiny for its size –.76″ thick at the back, .16″ at the front. Less than 3 pounds. Should be fun to carry around. I want.
• 45W power supply –should not cause Airplane power outlets to shut down nearly as often as does the MacBook Pro’s 85W power adapter, and the 45W adapter probably takes up much less space in a bag than its chunky 85W cousin. With any luck Apple will go with a thinner and longer power supply to match the laptop’s shape. Has anyone seen the power supply?
• Full size keyboard –Thank god. I’ve used the tiny keyboards on the Sony Vaio subnotebooks, and I can’t say I enjoyed the experience. Yuck.
• 13.3″ 1200×800 resolution LCD screen. LED backlit for instant illumination, low power consumption, and better recyclability (no mercury).
• Runs OS X –I like OS X. It’s Unixy, like my NetBSD box, only with a pretty and functional interface.

Neutrals

• No optical disc –but the MacBook Air comes with new software that allows you to access optical drives on other computers (OS X or Windows) over the wireless network.¹ In all the news about this product that I’ve read and heard, Apple’s people have been careful to only use the word “access”, which to me implies that it is unlikely that it will be possible (at least with this first version of the software) to burn discs on remote computer’s optical drives from a MacBook Air. Apple is likely betting most MacBook Air purchasers either already own a Mac or PC with an optical drive, already download install most of their software over a network, or will buy Apple’s “MacBook Air SuperDrive” for $99. Perhaps other brands of external USB drive will also be supported by the MacBook Air’s version of OS X for reading and writing to discs.
• Storage: slow and fragile vs. fast, non-volatile, and very expensive –1.8″ 80Gb hard drive (standard) or 64Gb flash-based drive. 1.8″ hard drives of the sort used in iPods are slower and more fragile than 2.5″ laptop hard drives, which are in turn less robust than the 3.5″ hard drives in desktop computers. That’s why your friend’s 2-year-old iPod sometimes doesn’t boot, and freezes, and skips. Of course, the small machine requires smaller drives, and this tradeoff is a necessary evil. Data backups will be very important for users of the MacBook Air who opt for the internal hard drive. It’s likely that the hard drive is a stopgap measure and the flash drive, now optional, is the future for this product. Flash drives, like Samsung’s SSD flash drives, use less power than conventional hard drives, provide greater speed, have no moving parts, and have longer life and greater reliability than tiny hard drives. The only problem is that they’re maddeningly expensive right now. Want a flash drive with 14Gb less space than the stock 80Gb hard disk in your Macbook Air? That’ll add $999 to your order.

Negatives

• No Firewire –a dealbreaker for me. Lack of a Firewire 400 port means I can’t use the MacBook Air for video capture, can’t connect external drives of usable speed for video work, very likely can’t boot from external drives, and can’t use Firewire target disk mode for diagnostic and data recovery purposes. Audio professionals, who could probably make use of a silent flash-based tiny laptop for field recording, are also out of luck since most professional audio interfaces require Firewire.
• No ethernet port –not a big problem for business travelers and the average user, since they can get by with wifi or with Apple’s USB 10/100Base-T ethernet dongle, but us media types really like our gigabit ethernet to copy our big files or even use them over a network, and you can’t do that over USB 2.0.
• Not the greatest graphics processor (GPU) –a dealbreaker for me is that the laptop uses an Intel integrated graphics chipset. As far as I know none of the Intel integrated chipsets are usable or certified for use with two applications I use frequently: the Final Cut Studio suite’s “Motion” and “Color”.
• No expansion slot –I didn’t expect one in a subnotebook, but the fact that expansion is only possible through the USB2 port is unfortunate. An ExpressCard slot would offer 2.5 Gbit/s of bandwidth, USB 2.0 only does 480 Mbits/s peak. I wouldn’t bother dreaming of USB 2.0 gigabit ethernet adapters or USB 2.0 eSata adapters, such would be pointless. I could live with this deficit for the size.
• No Firewire port –did I say that already? It still bugs me. A lot.

Ah well. This will be an awesome machine for any non-media-professional who travels a lot or would like a lighter and thinner laptop. It’s a very capable computer for its size.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple rumor, Macintosh, OS X, unix

1. they never do say whether running this software to make one’s mac or PC host its optical drive for use on a MacBook Air means that the host machine can’t itself use the drive [↩]

Apple’s publicity strategy for new products often involves keeping information about the products secret until the next major conference or other event at which the press and public gathers. In this way they generate a lot of hype for a relatively low cost.

So the fact that Apple announced the new line of Mac Pro desktop computers a week before the upcoming MacWorld conference tells me two things:

• They want to get this lesser product announcement out of the way so that they have more time to focus on something big.
• They want to get this lesser product announcement out into the press before it is completely overshadowed by the fireball of hype that will be generated by next week’s announcements. Announcing it after the conference’s keynote address will ensure that few will hear of it.

So obviously I’m expecting at least one big, new product announcement next week. If you’re the sort of person who gets excited over such things, I suspect you won’t be disappointed. My hope is for an announcement of the much-rumored new solid-state subnotebook. If other rumors are true, such as that the new machine features a touchscreen (particularly one that can be used with a pressure-sensitive stylus for sketching) or is a tablet rather than a notebook, that’d be even more interesting in an exotic sense, but I think just a really lightweight notebook would be a major-enough announcement to cause Apple to strategically push the Mac Pro news out of the limelight.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple rumor, Macintosh, OS X, rumor

If you use a mac and are curious about the whole RSS thing, or already read news sites and blogs and whatnot with an RSS reader, you could do worse than download a free copy of NetNewsWire. NetNewsWire is awesome, and it’s an app I paid good money for when there were plenty of free alternatives. Now that it’s free, there’s no reason not to give it a spin.

Technorati Tags: blogs, Deals, free, Macintosh, OS X, rss, software