Spent an interesting week at MeeGo Conf in San Francisco this week.  Overall, a very impressive project that’s doing something no other embedded OS is even attempting: building an open source, cross-platform OS for devices (netbooks, phones, tablets, cars, TVs & set-tops, etc., etc.).  Why is that important?  Cause if you think “app stores” are going to stay on phones and phones alone, you’re woefully behind-the-times.  And all MeeGo products are guaranteed to be compliant, so the same apps will run on all of them.  Even Google, in spite of the fact that Android is ostensibly open source, is trying to push three separate OSes for its device strategy: Android, ChromeOS, GoogleTV.  Hope you like writing the same game/music player/browser three times, developers!  And the fact that MeeGo just happens to be compatible with desktop Linux distributions — just gravy.

On the other hand, there are some unfortunate “black boxes” in the larger MeeGo project, presumably relics of upstream corporate bootstrapping.  One of those is branding.  At more than one session, I heard community members beg and plead for somebody to drop the preschooler-like cartoon characters.  That’d be wise.

More directly, however, we have a problem with the logotype.  The MeeGo wiki details the logo itself:

… and gives typography guidelines for the “MeeGo font,” which it describes as DIN, linking to the Wikipedia entry on the family.  It also shows a specimen, in three weights:

Pretty clear, right? Well, not really. You see, whatever font they actually chose, it’s at the very least a proprietary remake of DIN.  You can verify that by looking at the two open font implementations of DIN, Paulo Silva’s Open DIN Schriften Engshrift and Open Source Publishing’s OSP DIN. Here’s a side-by-side sample:

As you can see, neither is even close. Starkly different proportions and weights.  Neither has the same non-alphabetic glyphs (though I have no idea where any of them come from).  And that includes the text sample; re-reading the MeeGo wiki page, it could be interpreted to say that the MeeGo logotype is not in DIN at all, but rather is an original design. But regardless of whether that is the intent, the vague “use DIN” instructions can’t be followed, because whatever font they’re using, it’s not available in open source form.  Moreover, since both of the open DIN revivals are based on scanning the original paper designs, it’s clear that they better represent the original typeface — the MeeGo design team may have bought a nice font, but you can hardly call it DIN.  It’s some sort of derivative.  And they won’t say which.

So what now? Adopt an open source DIN for MeeGo? Specify which proprietary DIN-derivative is in use, then wait for a font designer to produce a MeeGo-compatible variant of one of the open versions? Ditch it all together, and pick something with a little more character?

The latter option might be worth considering, since even if you ignore the fact that DIN is a blasé street-sign face that makes you sad just to look at, reading through OSP’s blog on the subject reveals that the widely-repeated mantra that the original DIN was “put into the public domain” is less-than-documented and less-than-clear.  So that’s at least two strikes, maybe three, depending on how highly you value your local streetsign.  But who knows; maybe there is a third open source DIN revival out there that I simply haven’t located yet.  Any hints?

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Canonical’s Jono Bacon suggested on Identi.ca yesterday that Linux users should head over to the Adobe Web site and vote for the software behemoth to bring Photoshop to Linux.  It’s not the first time that someone has asked for this, but what’s irritating is the supporting logic, including, notably, the assertion that bringing Photoshop to Linux will bring new users to Linux: specifically, people who would like to switch OSes but  who are “mandated” to use Photoshop at work.

This is a straight-up Internet urban legend.  For starters, it’s flat out untrue that there are designers or photographers in *any* significant numbers who are required by “corporate policy” to use Photoshop.  Design firms don’t work that way.  Sure, there may be some person somewhere who has an office-wide rule to that effect — it’s a huge world — but it’s nonsense to suggest that it’s anything close to a meaningful blip in the stats.  But even if there was such a person, are any of us supposed to believe that they are not allowed to install GIMP on their computers — but that they will erase OS X or Windows and install Linux instead, in order to use Photoshop-on-Linux?  Are we supposed to believe that Management will allow that?

This chestnut is appealing, because it creates an appealingly noble protagonist: the strident designer who wants to use Linux, but isn’t allowed to, because he’s being held back by The Man.  How can we not want to help that prisoner of conscience?  But it’s an illusion: GIMP, like OpenOffice and Firefox, is available for Windows and OS X.  The prisoner has a path to freedom, and if he’s not taking it today, it’s not because Enemies of Freedom stand in the way, it’s because either the free apps are unknown to him or he’s looked and prefers what he uses now.  The crux is this: whatever barrier-to-usage exists that prevents a budding free-software user from installing and using GIMP on a non-free OS, that barrier is orders of magnitude smaller than the cost of writing-over the existing OS and installing a new one so that the user can use the hypothetical Photoshop-on-Linux.  The path to conversion is Free App on Existing OS, then Free OS altogether.  It is not Proprietary App on Free OS, then Freedom altogether.  The only people capable of thinking in reverse like that are operating system vendors.

I get why nobody likes that solution; it’s harder on the open source community.  It means we have to do hard, thankless work on components like GTK+-on-OSX, on installers and focus and different keybindings, on single-button pointing devices and application resources in screwy Apple Places, and jump through all kinds of other hoops that don’t really seem to earn us many more users. And it seems like an ethical compromise to port free software to a proprietary OS (though for some reason, it’s not to do the reverse…?)  It’s much easier to say “Hey, Adobe, you do all the work to port Photoshop to Linux, we’ll wait right over here.”

Honestly, any designer who wants to try using Photoshop on Linux right now, can.  The pricetag of a CrossOver license is way, way less than a new OSX box or a new Windows 7 license.  So why don’t these designers try that whenever they upgrade their PC hardware?  Partly it’s cause CrossOver ain’t perfect.  But the big reason is simply inertia, like every other PC user has.  Couple that with the fact that an office-ful of designers probably buys bundled licenses for  its Adobe products, and the fact that big firms have The IT Guys do all that installing stuff, and you have a situation where nobody’s going to change operating systems only to use the same apps they can already use today.

Every designer I know has a Dock full of apps; little ones, big ones, expensive ones, cheapo ones.  Flexible ones and single-purpose ones.  Nobody does design work 40 hours a week in a single application.  So if we want to bring designers into the fold of open source and free software, we have to start by making the free apps more appealing to the designer currently running other stuff on a proprietary OS.  Easier to download, easier to install, better integrated with the existing OS conventions.  We have to pre-load things like PSPI with GIMP, include more high-end plugins; we have to promote (and yeah, enhance) GIMP’s PSD import capabilities.  GIMP can already export to PSD, something I suspect Bacon isn’t aware of due to his corporate policy comment.  But of course Adobe changes and extends the format periodically, since it’s their ball.

The upshot is that designers care about results, and they’ll use any tool they can get their hands on if it can do cool stuff.  If anything, designers are less resistant to trying new applications than generic-office-workers or middle-managers. The company may insist on saving work in a file format like PSD, particularly when working in a team situation, but that’s an interoperability issue.  In all of the years I spent being a photographer and designer, and working with both, the only time I ever heard a company dictate a software choice, it was for a DAM that they used to keep in sync with remote clients and contractors.  And yep, it was a proprietary one: Extensis.  You know what — that’s another area where free software needs to do some work.  But designers who want to use Linux but can’t because of the lack of Adobe CS?  Come on.

Corporate buying policies are a big deal, and a big hurdle, but not here — they affect offices that upgrade their desktops en masse and buy suites of licenses, and (in my estimation, far more importantly) they affect schools and universities, who negotiate for software licenses in bulk, and have IT or “Academic Computing” offices that manage multiple campus-wide labs, usually remotely, rather than the teachers who actually spend their time in those labs with the students.  They affect governments, which is probably an even bigger obstacle because of all the rules and legal requirements that restrict their buying practices.  Open source needs to make in these areas.  Porting proprietary software to Linux and swapping out the OS isn’t going to do it.

Let’s put “There are people dying to use Linux, but can’t because they have to use Photoshop” to rest — you know,  so we can give air-time back to the other oft-repeated urban legend about GIMP adoption: that no “professional” users will touch it because of its “unprofessional” name.  Cause guess what: that’s flat out untrue, too.  But one canard at a time.

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Finally time to take this quasi-public.  I’ve been working on an open font, a revival of the 1908 News Gothic by ATF.  I’m calling it News Cycle, and you can find the Launchpad project at https://launchpad.net/newscycle/

I chose News Gothic for a couple of reasons.  (A) there is not currently an open source implementation of it. (B) I kinda like it.  (C) News Gothic was a stalwart newspaper font, which appeals to me as a journalist.  (D) There’s room for improvement. The various proprietary revivals cover only Basic Latin, which leaves out much of the world.  Orthogonally, although there are several other good realist open source typefaces out there, the original News Gothic was designed at multiple weights: meaning Regular, Demi, Light, Heavy, etc.  To my knowledge there are extremely few open fonts that have this property, so reviving one built for it would potentially be useful in a lot of different ways.

That said, this is also intended to be a learning experience for me, which it certainly has been thus far.  Learning about type design, learning the open source font toolchain, and so on.  Not to mention learning about writing systems.  Thus far, I’ve only implemented Latin-based glyphs, and although I’ve done more than were originally included in the original 1908 specimens, I’ve already learned a lot about the writing system that I use and that much of the “Western” world uses.  That part’s quite entertaining.

In any event, this is only the beginning, but if you’re a die-hard glutton for punishment, you can download the FontForge sources from the Launchpad project page, or a binary TrueType font file (.ttf).  You can drop it into ~/.fonts/ on Linux, /Users/Yourname/Library/Fonts/ on OS X, or C:\Windows\Fonts\ on Windows. It is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, which grants users the right to modify and redistribute the font.  That said, if you know someone else who might be interested in it, you would be doing them a tremendous favor by pointing them here rather than simply emailing them a copy of your copy; this is an ongoing work that will change.

I’d appreciate all kinds of feedback; I’m relatively happy with the basic glyphs and metrics, but the glyphs I’m adding now are the ones I’m less familiar with — including accented characters.  In particular, if you’re a non-English reader and you find something that looks out of place in your language, let me know or file a “bug report” on the Launchpad project page.

Right now, News Cycle Regular covers 74% of Basic Latin, 74% of Latin-1 Supplement, 77% of Latin Extended-A, and a teeny tiny percentage of Latin Extended-B.  I’ve only just started the hinting.  Many thanks to the fine folks at the Open Font Library project and the wider open font community, particularly Dave Crossland (who puts up with a ton of lame questions from me), Nicolas Spalinger, and Denis Jacquerye.

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Dear Interwebs,

Is this possible?  I’d like to create a mouse-deformable elastic SVG image.  In other words, the user can click anywhere inside the image and drag the mouse around, and in response the object(s) underneath the cursor would be stretched in the direction of mouse movement, as if they were rubber sheets.  The clincher is elasticity — I’d like the distorted objects to animate back to their original shape on mouseUp or loss of focus.

I’ve been reading up on SVG animation docs last night and this morning, but I haven’t found any actual examples that come close to what I’m talking about.  Most of the tutorial sites deal with primitives (and justifiably so, of course), and this concept clearly involves  different stuff … restoring original positions of the nodes, etc.  Got any help?

Thx!

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Way, way back in aught 7, I wrote this rarely-read piece about the trials of converting the legacy PhotoCD (.pcd) format into something useful on a modern day computing machine.  The principle problem was that since no new files were being produced in .pcd format, the knowledge of how to correctly decode them was slowly beginning to atrophy, even though the spec was open and the source code to tools like ImageMagick was open as well.

Just last week, I received an email from Ted Felix, the PhotoCD decoding ninja who did all of the groundwork for the applications I mentioned in the original article. Since the piece has gone into read-only archive mode following the transfer of Linux.com from SourceForge to the Linux Foundation, I’m posting the info Ted sent to me here, instead.

The news is the launch of a new command-line tool called pcdtojpeg. Pcdtojpeg appears to use Ted’s luminance look-up-table (LUT), which correctly converts from .pcd’s weird PhotoYCC color model to standard sRGB without blasting out the highlights. I haven’t used it yet to report on any other fancy features, but it’s good to see work in this area continue.  I only wish it were pcdtotiff….

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