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Unsung Software

What are the least glamorous software tools for the Macintosh that you can’t live without? I’m not talking about the likes of Quicksilver, Adium or other high profile applications that, even if they don’t come from major league publishers, manage to get plenty of coverage already.

Rather, I’m talking about little known or little-discussed applications, widgets or utilities without which your productivity just plummets. I know that I’ve got a handful of these that I unequivocally must install on any Mac I use; I’m passionately dedicated to them. So it occurred to me the other day that lots of people probably have unsung favorites too; and by virtue of their modest dignity, I likely haven’t heard of them.

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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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Total Eclipse of the Heart

L’EclisseIn the next few days I expect — or at least I hope — we’ll see a lot of thoughtful remembrances of the life and work of the great Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, who died on Monday at the age of ninety-four. Here’s the Times obituary and critic Stephen Holden’s insightful appraisal, plus an article at Slate that tackles this great loss from the doubly unfortunate angle of having also lost Ingmar Bergman the same day. What a tragic day for film.

These and other articles will give you a much more well-rounded idea of Antonioni’s career and impact than I ever could. Still, I want to add one thing: his 1962 masterwork “L’Eclisse” is among my favorite movies of all time. Few more elegant, exquisitely crafted or beautifully populated essays on alienation have ever been committed to film.

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Don’t Ever Leave the Airport

While my trip to New Mexico was thoroughly enjoyable — you can now see my pictures posted to Flickr — I’ve just about had it with traveling.

Thanks to a combination of inclement weather and corporate incompetence, my return trip from Albuquerque, NM to New York City took a total of twenty-four hours. My original and re-scheduled flights were delayed, canceled or, through airline mismanagement, never properly booked no less than six times, causing me to spend virtually all day yesterday sitting on my rear at airport gates. It felt like a miracle when I limped home at 1:00a on Tuesday morning after first setting out for the airport late on Sunday evening.

For me, there are two take-aways from this misadventure: first, I’ll never again violate my personal rule of avoiding layover itineraries when traveling across the continental United States, especially if I’m flying into or from relatively small market destinations like Albuquerque. It’s just too risky; when a scheduled flight is canceled or delayed, the paucity of flight alternatives can be disastrous. Direct is the only way to go.

Second, I’ll never again fly the airline I flew to and from Albuquerque — whose name, in the interest of discretion, I won’t reveal here. That’s right, I’m not saying who it was that squandered an entire day of my life. Not even if you call me names, put a curse on my subway line, or even if you acronym-ize the title of this blog post.

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Way Out West

This weekend I’m in the beautiful state of New Mexico visiting my good friends Gong and Bonnie, who live in Santa Fe. It’s my first trip here ever, and it’s beautiful. The light, in particular, is unnaturally gorgeous. Or, at least, that’s how I’m explaining the photos I’ve been taking today.

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One Book to Specify Them All

FontBookSome people find it hard to believe, but I do in fact like to use typefaces other than Helvetica. Recently, for instance, I’ve been really feelin’ Apex Serif, a beautiful, contemporary typeface that, as the name suggests, even has serifs. I like it so much that it’s the primary typeface for a side project I’m working that’s currently in ‘coming soon’ mode.

It’s not that often that I come across typefaces that I like as much as Helvetica, or even as much as Apex Serif. I probably wouldn’t have found it, though, if I hadn’t been flipping through the FontShop’s massive, nearly comprehensive tome, “FontBook.” It’s billed as “the largest typeface reference in the world,” and just a single flip through its 1,500 pages leaves one with no reason to doubt that claim.

The book is most directly a product of the mad mind of Erik Spiekermann and co-edited by Jürgen Siebert and Mai-Linh Thi Truong. But I was first turned on to this new version by Stephen Coles, author and editor of the wonderful Typographica blog. Stephen was a long-time user of the previous edition of the book, and was so persistent in sending his notes and corrections to the editors, that they hired him to help with this edition, fact-checking, editing and working on cross-references. In the interview that follows (conducted over email), I asked him about who would take on an outsized project like this and why.

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On Blogging Well and Writing Poorly

Based on the number of reader remarks at the bottom of yesterday’s post, my write-up of Greg Maletic’s wonderful documentary “Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball” wasn’t exactly a hit.

Was that because pinball isn’t among the topics that ignite tremendous passion, at least among the Subtraction.com audience? Maybe. But I think it’s more likely because of the way I wrote the piece.

I’m a long-time reader and fan of The New Yorker, and yesterday’s piece was my clumsy attempt at aping a bit of its editorial style. That magazine’s matter-of-fact yet constructionally elaborate prose has always been very attractive to me, both because it’s so incisively compelling and because it’s so efficient. I tend to go on and on when I write, using a lot of words to say relatively little. Writers for The New Yorker use a lot of words to communicate quite a lot of ideas with great richness. Can you blame me if it’s something I aspire to?

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