An Important Message for .Mac Customers

.MacIt probably doesn’t need to be said, but yesterday’s announced upgrades to Apple’s perpetually anemic .Mac service left me, and probably many others, pretty disappointed. Surely, this level of underwhelming, incremental improvement can’t be the most serious response to the changing world of online services that the company could muster. Can it? If so, it’s pathetic.

But! Such is life under the reign of Steven P. Jobs. Which is to say, he can’t provide magic and wonder at every single product announcement, can he? Sometimes all he has to work with is his infamous skill for making sizzle look like steak. Usually, it’s a trick that’s less transparent than this.

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The Framework Formally Known as ’Prints

Grids are good. I’ve said so many times, and I think people are catching on. Not that I’m taking credit for the rising stock of this creative tool among Web designers, mind you; I just wanted to say how happy I am that more and more thought is being put into what it means to use typographic grids as a layout principle in digital media.

What’s even better, a lot of this new thought goes far beyond what I myself would be capable of contributing to the conversation. Take the Blueprint framework, for example (not to be confused with the promising Blueprint content management system from Inventive Labs). It’s a foundation for developing typographic grids using Cascading Style Sheets that was developed by Norwegian tech student Olav Frihagen Bjørkøy and released last Friday after several months of development. It’s an impressive piece of work that’s leagues past what I could have offered in terms of technical insight into how to build grids more efficiently for today’s browsers.

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Old Rumors, New Rumors

Supposedly there are updates to Apple’s .Mac service due to be announced tomorrow. I can only hope it’s true, but I’m not sure if I’ll be enraged or depressed if they don’t happen. Fingers crossed.

Speaking of rumors, here’s an idea about the rumor that floated several weeks ago in which it was suggested that Apple might sometime in the future release a smaller, less expensive version of its iPhone in order to reach a wider consumer base.

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A Man of Illegible Letters

Oof. I had a look at my handwriting the other day, when I scribbled a note to accompany a package I was sending off. My chicken scratch looked horrible, nearly illegible, even. After years and years of keyboard use, my penmanship has clearly deteriorated.

It’s not that I write by hand so rarely that it was a shock for me to see how poorly formed my letters are. But I was writing at a moderately greater length than usual, and it made an impression on me how malformed many of the letters turned out. I had to go back in and add missing strokes and stems to many of the otherwise inscrutable letters just to make sure I didn’t come across as some kind of maniac.

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