Web design & FOSS

I'm afraid to break the news to all the Ubuntu linux fanbois+grrls out there that Ubuntu is not perfect. I've had some display errors with Gnome DO and the notification icon. So sorry to let the side down ;)

Can you retweet a blog post emanating from a tweet? On the day that Radio 4 hails the mighty Twitter onto the world political stage, I think anything is admissible ;)

Jacob Kaplan-Moss made a very insightful tweet which can be summed up thus:

“Closed-source software gets worse with each release (Microsoft, Adobe, …). Open-source software gets better (OOo, Ubuntu, …). Discuss.”

And then followed it up with a blog post entitled The power of “no”:

“closed source software seems prone to featuritis, to bloatware, to a trend of more bullet points at the expense of elegance. Open source seems mostly immune to these pressures.”

And the reason? The power of “no”. The power of the people actually developing the software to say “no”, over the marketeers and managers, so that technical quality is paramount.

Interesting stuff, and something that is echoed by the Drupal CMS developers/contributors Development Seed, who are arguing for a smallcore approach to Drupal, making it more of Content Management Framework rather than an out-of-the-box Content Management System.

This is backed up by the User Experience Designer Leisa Reichelt, who worked with Mark Boulton on the Drupal 7 D7UX project. Her post entitled Designing for the wrong target audience (or why Drupal should be a developer tool and not a consumer product) pretty much sums it up. In the words of Steve Ballmer, it's about Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!, when it's the developers who are the target audience.

I have been struck by how the simplest of ideas can make a substantial impact. I was using internet banking recently, and a couple of banks have started to submit the username and password from subsequent pages. This way the information never travels together.

Simple, so why has it taken decades to come into effect?!

Back in May of this year, a new and potentially revolutionary web service was announced that could change the way we literally see the web. That service was Typekit, and the idea is to offer a subscription service so that web designers can include fonts that aren't available on the browsers computer.

The technology (I think!) is a combination of the @font-face CSS and JavaScript which enables the actual fonts to be downloaded.

Obviously, there's a question of copyright - you can't just have people downloading fonts which they otherwise would have to pay hundreds of pounds for - “While it’s technically quite easy to link to fonts, it’s legally more nuanced.”. This is one of the key areas for Typekit, making the system secure enough so that type foundries will feel comfortable offering their fonts for subscription.

Which led me to think, there should be far fewer issues with offering the same service for Free Open Source fonts, such as those DejaVu, Droid, FreeSans, Vera etc. You wouldn't even have to download the free fonts to your server if they were hosted by someone like the Open Font Library.

I'll rustle something up and get on the case ;)

A friend of mine had to email a multi-page document that they had scanned in. Rather than send it as separate files, they were trying to create one PDF file to attach to the email.

But Adobe charge a lot of money (currently £316.25 inc. VAT) for such functionality. Ow.

Enter pdf toolkit, a cross-platform command line program that enables you to manipulate PDF files in a number of ways.

For my purposes, all I had to do was install pdftk using Synaptic Package Manager on Ubuntu, and then utter the totally reasonable incantation on the command line:

pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output 123.pdf

From problem to solution in about 10 minutes. Thank you, Sid Steward. Thank you Open Source software :)