In LA

I like writing, sketching, and I like to play with the odd electronic gadget, so I thought this IOGear “Mobile Digital Scribe” (AKA the GPEN200N) seemed an intriguing device. This weirdly technologized pen can be had for $44.95 at Amazon.com, at least until the end of September.¹

I bought and received mine, taking funds from my geeky-and-probably-unnecessary-device budget. A close look reveals that there are two parts to this gadget; The pen and the base station. The base station clips to a piece or pad of paper, and is used to record the movement of the pen, it features a single button that can be held-down to turn the base station on and off², and can be pressed quickly in order to indicate that the user is sketching a new page (up to 50 pages worth of scribblings can be recorded at a stretch). The base connects to the computer via USB cable, and the included software will instantly transfer any recorded notes to a specified location on the computer as TIFF images. The USB connection also charges the base station’s internal battery. The pen uses a couple of those tiny watch or hearing aid batteries, and shuts itself off whenever its not moving, so apparently they don’t need to be replaced often.³

I connected the base to my computer, updated its firmware to 1.76 so that it’d work with Mac OS X, rebooted my computer, unplugged the base, clipped it to some paper, wrote a bit, then plugged the base back into the computer. Everything I wrote transferred over to the computer automatically as a tiff file (deposited into a folder I’d pre-designated), and looked very very good. I’d guess that the base unit stores pen movements in a vector-based format, which is then rendered to a tiff file after it’s transferred to the computer.

I tried the bundled OCR⁴ software, “MyScript Notes Light” on Windows XP inside VMware Fusion. On my first test, it worked surprisingly well. Subsequent tests were not so successful. I think it gets confused when it tries to emulate the layout of text written in lines that are not completely horizontal. I also scribbled a couple of Chinese characters (ni hao) and it recognized those and converted them to text (in a separate pass with the OCR software set to simplified Chinese). There’s no reason that the high-resolution TIFF images created by the pen couldn’t be opened in more capable OCR software, perhaps resulting in more usable transcriptions.

Mouse mode does work, the pen can be used to draw and drag on the computer. A click can be executed by pressing the point of the pen down or by clicking the pen’s side button. There’s a bit of lag, which would suck for gaming, but mouse mode could potentially be of use with photoshop (note: the pen is not pressure sensitive).

I half-busted one of the base unit’s clips trying to clip it to a stack of paper larger than it can accept. So my recommendation would be “don’t do what I did”. Other than that hiccup, my thoughts on the IOGear Mobile Digital Scribe (or GPEN200N) are positive so far.

1. It’s currently marked down from $129 (WTFLOL) to $64.95, and then there’s a $20 mail-in rebate. [↩]
2. It took me a day to figure this out –the little guide it ships with says nothing about this, and holding the button produces some bizarre twiddlings of items on the base station’s LCD display, animations that don’t appear to portend an imminent shutdown, before it indeed shuts down. [↩]
3. Whether or not those batteries will ever need to replaced will depend on whether or not I tire quickly of this new toy or actually find it useful and take notes with it daily. [↩]
4. Optical Character Recognition – it converts one’s writing into text. [↩]

Here’s the shocking, photographic evidence, which proves what so many have wanted to know for so long: It is possible –nay, simple, to upgrade the firmware of the Creative Vado HD on a mac, using the Windows-only Vado firmware updating application¹, running inside an instance of Windows XP in VMWare Fusion. How exciting!

If this upgrade makes it so that my Vado HD stops freezing every-other time I connect it to my computer, that would be fantastic. The reboot process for the Vado involves opening it up and removing the battery². This is a very annoying process, especially after I’ve spent the effort to slip the thing inside its protective silicon case³, at which point the battery door is inaccessible. I’d bet that’s something they fixed in the first firmware update, or else this thing would have accumulated a greater number of negative reviews by now.

Technorati Tags: Creative Vado HD, filmmaking, Garbanzo Beans, Hack, hot deal, Macintosh, OS X, Vado HD, software, unix, video, virtualization, vmware fusion, Windows XP

1. v1220 [↩]
2. It’d be nice if, as on the iPhone, one could reboot the Vado HD by holding down an unholy combination of buttons for a few seconds. Requiring users to open up the device and manually power-cycle it is bad design and/or optimism regarding the device’s stability to the point of naïvete. [↩]
3. That silicon case is tight during the installation and removal process, I’m worried about tearing it just for a reboot [↩]

Oh how I hate the above error message. It’s not that it’s completely uninformative, but it’s a perfect case of “so close but yet so far”…

Anyone who uses as many external disks on a Mac as I do is apt to occasionally have trouble properly unmounting and ejecting those disks¹. Before unmounting a disk, it’s necessary to stop accessing files on the disk. This is often an easy thing to do –if I’ve loaded a file from an external disk into an application, I just close the document or quit the application entirely. If I’ve goofed and am still using files on the drive, OS X will refuse to unmount the drive and will display the error dialog I’ve pasted above.²

But often it’s less than obvious which application or function built-in to the operating system is using a file on the drive. There are applications that don’t play nice, and keep file handles open to files on a disk even after you’ve closed all documents that use those files³. There are functions built into the operating system that access files on a disk without calling any attention to themselves. This error message could and should be a hell of a lot more informative and useful.

A simple set of commands in Terminal⁴ can reveal which application is using a file on a particular disk. Since this information is available, is incredibly useful, and can be quickly retrieved in the Terminal, I see no reason that it is not just included in the initial error message. Telling me that a disk is still in use is not nearly as useful as telling me that a disk is still in use by Microsoft Word, or that a disk is still being shared with another computer.

In this case, the terminal command “lsof | egrep -i 400Gb” reported that a process named “smbd” was still using the drive. Since I’m a Unix geek this is useful information to me, but since OS X tries to also be useful to people who wouldn’t know a Samba daemon if it ate their grandmother, this process should be simplified. In an ideal world, the error message above would read “The disk ‘400Gb_Thing’ is in use by OS X’s Windows file sharing. Would you like to stop sharing this drive and eject it?” and would feature both “OK” and “Cancel Ejection” buttons.

This is a no-brainer. Apple, please fix. Thanks.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Final Cut Pro, Macintosh, OS X, software, unix, Win2K, Windows, Windows 2000, Windows XP

1. It’s a good idea to actually unmount disks prior to unplugging them, modern filesystems need to be given a proper send-off before disconnection to keep the data in good shape. [↩]
2. Windows users (and I am one), please refrain from feeling smug at this tale of Mac woe. Don’t get me started on the Windows “Safely Remove Hardware” dialogue and how much fun it is to try to remember the model numbers of each of my external drives so that I can find them in that list. It’s unconscionable that this feature wasn’t redesigned for Windows Vista. They must have used a single USB drive as the test case. [↩]
3. I often just have to quit Final Cut Pro before ejecting a drive for this reason, sometimes it just won’t let go of a file even when all FCP projects have been closed and I’m looking at an empty Browser [↩]
4. “lsof | egrep -i portion-of-disk-name”, or in this case “lsof | egrep -i 400Gb”, without the quotes. [↩]

I’ve started to tire of my blog’s design and have begun to tear it down¹ in order to rebuild. “In LA v2.0″ will be wider², mostly free of sans-serif fonts³, with larger images, more whitespace, a redesigned theme and header –and the page will display in 3D⁴ if you look at it through polarized glasses.

1. er, I’m tearing down and rebuilding an auxiliary copy [↩]
2. because I refuse to continue to design for 800×600 resolution displays [↩]
3. blocks of text with serifs are easier to read by word shape, unless you’re on an OS that doesn’t render them properly :) [↩]
4. or at least with 50% less glare [↩]

I just reinstalled the bundled Vista Home Edition on my Dell¹ and I did nothing out of the ordinary to provoke anger from the Windows Loa, and yet I’m taunted by this bizarre, uninformative, and entertaining error message.

Do click on the image to see it full-size and check out its actual confounding text. So my system either does have or does not have a problem, and a solution either has not been found or has been found (or a solution to a different, unspecified problem has been found). And note that the “Solution Found!” text and icon were not active links to anything, clicking them accomplished nothing.

I think the problem may just be that I’m running Windows Vista.

1. Yes, I occasionally do touch OS’s other than OS X and NetBSD, gotta have something to regret in this life. [↩]

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 [↩]