F’d up Font Palette

Font PaletteJust because I’m about to add further to the list of Tiger gripes that have flooded the Internet since its release last Friday night, it doesn’t mean that I don’t like it. I like it a lot, I really do; not just its new features and user interface improvements, but also its under-the-hood advancements, which make me feel very confident about the operating system’s long-term prospects.

But it’s a complex platform, and any time Apple upgrades it, it’s impossible to avoid baring imperfections, some old, some new. A case in point is the Mac OS X font palette, the system-wide, floating interface for typeface selection that received a major overhaul with the release of Tiger’s predecessor, Panther. It’s a fairly powerful interface for control of typographic specifications in most all Cocoa applications, and so it plays a rarely discussed but central role in Mac productivity.

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Noisy Signals

An Adium instant message window interrupted me at my desk last night. It was Jason Fried of 37signals, and he was like, “Dude, up for guest-posting over at our Signal vs. Noise weblog for, like, the month of May?” I was all like, “Dude, what does that entail?” And he was all like, “Dude, whatever you want!” And I was all like, “Dude, can I start off with something mildly inflammatory about Microsoft?” And he was all like, “Dude, go for it.” And then I was like, “Dude, that’s totally radical, I’ll do it.” And he was like, “Dude, right on!” And now you know.

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Throw It in Your Backpack

BackpackAs if you could avoid hearing the news: the prolific 37signals launched their latest online application today and it’s called Backpack. As a beta tester, I took a crack at helping the company craft its messaging for this hard-to-describe product, and the best I could come up with was this: “It’s perhaps the most convincing Web answer yet to the power, flexibility and simplicity of a spiral-bound notebook.” You can tell that I had my little marketing hat on for that particular brainstorming session.

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Tiger Blemishes

Several readers have noted some problems in the display of my comments entry form, courtesy of the very recent iterations of Safari released with Mac OS X 10.3.9 and, of course, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. In essence, what were once orderly boxes now appear tumbled and in disarray when rendered by the new versions of this Web browser. The form remains fully functional; it’s presentation has just been more or less destroyed, is all. This is a byproduct of Apple’s vigilant, ongoing improvements to Safari’s CSS rendering engine, a process which I wholeheartedly support, in theory… I won’t lie to you, though, the fact that little bugs like this continue to arise annoys the heck out of me.

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