Minor news flash! I’ve recently released News Cycle 0.2, my fledgling open font, which you can grab from . Or from the project’s at Launchpad.net. This is the first public release, which ought to be more-or-less stable for everyday use. It includes all of Unicode Basic Latin, Latin Extended-A, and Latin Extended-B, which covers Western & Eastern European languages any many African writing systems as well. It is fully hinted, instructed, and kerned. The downloadable package is a plain TrueType .ttf file — just drop it in the appropriate folder on your OS of choice.
I’m also happy to announce that thanks largely to Dave Crossland, Google has added News Cycle to the . This means if you want to use News Cycle as the body copy font for your site, you don’t have to download it at all; just visit on the GWFD site, and copy-n-paste the sample code. Google serves up the font; everybody wins. So far, it seems to be doing respectable numbers-wise, a little over 55,000 hits in the first five days. That’s a start.
I’ve also added a Flattr micropayment link to the project page at Glyphography.com; if you want to help out and you use Flattr, every little bit helps by freeing up some time for me from the drudgery of freelancing to work on drawing glyphs and demystifying the technical aspects of font creation. A substantial portion of the latter process involves me bugging Dave with beginner-level questions, to which I owe him a lot of thanks and hopefully a reduction in future pester-loads. Google also has a donation link on its directory site, so feel free to use both if you really want to help.
That whole “keep the project going” thing ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie, either. This 0.2 release is pretty basic: it covers a lot of punctuation and enough Latin to write in, but there’s still more to come. My plan is for the next stable release (0.4) to include Cyrillic, Greek, and an extended selection of mathematical symbols. There will be a lot of work involved in that. After that, I have to start in on italic and boldface variants. It never ends.
Anyway, my thanks to everyone who’s dropped a note to say they liked how it looks, plus a special thanks to those who helped me test out the font in languages other than English.
Put up a new landing page for my OFL font project today. Check it out at At present, of course, “fonts” is kind of a misnomer, since there is only one available: News Cycle Regular. But as Bill Cosby once told us, there’s always room for one more.
Canonical’s Jono Bacon 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 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 changeoperating 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 with GIMP, include more 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 , too. But one canard at a time.
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
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.
I’ve been reading about GNOME Shell this week, in preparation for GNOME 3.0. A lot of the UI changes I am ambivalent about (workspaces, for example, I never, ever, ever, use; consequently I could not care less how their behavior changes), some of them I think are great, others I’m not so sure about. The one I’m most interested in learning more about is the demolition of the Applications menu, because that is the primary interface for launching apps, which are, of course, the things we need to Do Stuff.
So I’ve been reading the usability design docs for GNOME Shell and trying to figure out what I think they’re saying. Frankly, it’s a bit unclear. The Applications menu is broadly replaced by the “Activities” pane, which subsumes the role of Activities, Recent Documents, and Filesystem Bookmarks (yeah, I know; it’s still labeled “Places” despite the fact that that name communicates no information and ambiguously suggests it’s about Location services, which is a genuine embarrassment since GNOME is adding support for that re WiFi and Zeitgeist). But here’s the issue: in the screenshots and screencasts, the Activities pane always appears to hold four or five (tops) application icons. If you need access to more than four or five applications on a regular basis, you have to search for them, then find the app you seek in an alphabetically-sorted list. I can tell you right now that that is not going to work for me. I regularly use two dozen or more apps. Some of these I keep open perpetually (mainly communication apps, terminals, and Emacs), but most of the others I close down when not in use, simply to conserve memory/swap, etc (Inkscape, The Gimp, Rawstudio, Scribus, Krita, some Prism sites, Rhythmbox, MythTV, VLC, the calculator, Deluge, office apps, Grip, PiTiVi, Grsync, and so on and so on).
Having to search every time I need to launch the fifth-or-sixth app out of that list will take me more time. If there’s no way to configure this behavior, I’m not looking forward to it.
That isn’t to say that the current Applications menu is All That. It relies on strict categories, but the categories are broad and fill up rapidly. Here’s the current count of my GNOME app menu categories:
accessories: 32
archimedes: 2
education: 3
games: 19
graphics: 41, 2 in a submenu
internet: 35
office: 22
other: 3
programming: 9
sound n video: 44
system tools: 15
unviersal access: 1
Obviously, you can see some bias in what tasks I do just by counting those menus, but the point is that everyone who uses their desktop to work has usage patterns. More than one, I think. I can group what I use my environment for broadly into office “stuff”, work communication, social communication, creative, entertainment, and utility computing. They overlap; office stuff includes taking screenshots and writing, plus emailing and installing software. But utility computing includes updating software, too, and work and social communication both could involve IM, Thunderbird, and other apps.
Still, in my own introspection, when I’m in one mode I need to stay in it for a length of time, then switch. When I’m working, I’ll have and app open to test and I’ll write about it, and I’ll email/IM/VoIP questions and answers back-and-forth to its creator. When I’m doing creative work, I’ll need to switch back and forth between the creative apps, often many many times. But I stay within one circle of apps until I change modes.
The way I’ve customized GNOME 2.x to work with me in this method is through the use of launchers that I place on a dedicated panel, grouped roughly by task list, and by having the “perpetual” apps launch at login. So far, I’m not seeing in the GNOME Shell documentation how I’ll be able to do anything like that in GNOME 3. The Activities pane seems to limit the raw number of launchers I have immediate access to, and it seems to enforce either “most used” or “most recently used” as the sorting criterion — unclear which. That has two problems: first, the perpetual apps are almost always going to qualify as “most used,” and when switching modes, a boatload of apps I specifically don’t need are going to qualify as “most recently used.” In short, if I’m not able to customize the application launching behavior, it’s going to slow me down.
