Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set:
No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client
Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market
Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases
Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text
And now, after nearly a year of planning and research we believe that these requirements have been met.
I like these ideas and I’m going to test it out on a site soon. I’ll probably do so here, before I attempt this on Spoke’s site (which is comprised of SIFR).
The two things I like about Cufon (and SIFR for that matter):
The ability to use fonts regardless of them being installed on the web machine (less images)
Easily degrade to specified fonts (instead of your site not working on a mobile client like an iphone).
One thing that has bothered me throughout the examples of Cufon is double-clicking on a paragraph of text doesn’t just highlight the text, it highlights the text near it as well. Like this picture I snapped of highlighted text, it messes up just a bit. Something to work on, but if it degrades gracefully and works without flash installed, this would be an annoyance and nothing more. It looks promising.
Do you have any geeky / creative things you’d do if only had the time and the money time?
The idea for this post came about when I was setting up this blog. For once, I had the time and the need to build a WordPress site (we’ll be migrating our Spoken Whirred blog to WordPress and I needed a site to test with).
Cross one of the ole geek checklist.
Setup a wordpress site
What’s left on my geek checklist? Let’s see (off the top of my head):
Build a web site / application in Ruby on Rails
Build a facebook application
Use Objective C or Cocoa (for a Mac app or iPhone) – (This one is totally unrealistic, because I’ll never have this much time)
Please stop using Internet Explorer 6. It came out in 2001, is riddled with bugs and forces developers that want to use cool tools like MooTools write CSS and HTML hacks that make me cringe.
I understand you are fearful of change. I get it. Don’t upgrade to Office 2007. Doesn’t bother me at all. Don’t upgrade to Vista. Heck that OS compelled me to switch to a Mac. I also understand that your IT support staff is not prepared for the onslaught of calls due to the ribbon replacing menus in Office 07.
But the whole goal of Internet Explorer 7 was to be more secure (i.e. less for you to worry about). Especially now that it’s been out for 2 years. Also, it’s a browser, so it won’t crash your network or cause a flood of calls to your IT support center.
In conclusion, this is my plea to you corporate America, to do what’s best for web developers everywhere and upgrade to IE7 already. The world of tab pages and standards based CSS support awaits you.
So today I'm listening to Pandora again and I see the ad below, confirming what I guessed at in a previous post – Pandora is geographically targeting ads to users.
This banner ad is specifically for an open house at the University on November 21. This Open House is in St. Louis.
The landing page is also well-done because it's well designed and has the requisite social media sharing toolbar. Although it should probably list the address of the open house on the landing page somewhere.
A few years ago I managed a similar campaign for another college in St. Louis, and although those campaigns were successful at driving traffic from direct mail, organic searches and pay-per-click advertising , it
would have been nice to use other tools like this.
Watching last comic standing and couldn’t help but notice the banner ads promoting the mummy movie. The attempts to get ads past the DVR take a new step. Hope this doesn’t catch on.
This commercial about sums up my previous post about why I switched to a mac. My less than a year old HP laptop sits gathering dust, while I type this on my MacBook Pro (now with 4 Gb of RAM!!!)
I used to be a programmer using only Microsoft tools.
I used to love those tools.
I now use a Mac.
WOW. After being a "Microsoft" programmer and a project manager for a good chunk of my career, I have now switched to Mac full time.
If Microsoft can’t keep me as a customer, they are in trouble.
Why did they lose me? Simple.
I want my computer to work – all the time. I don’t like it crashing. I don’t like it going slow. I don’t like having to learn how to fix problems in the registry.
7 month agos I bought a brand new HP Laptop with Windows Vista and Dual Core Intel / 4Gb of RAM. After a few weeks, I realized it was pretty slow and clunky. I’d even been using Vista since it came out so those issues were nothing new for me.
Fast forward a couple months and my HP laptop keeps getting slower and was getting more and more buggy (even with the what seemed like millions of windows updates every week). Every once in a while it would just crash. Every time I closed powerpoint I would get an error. Etc. Etc. I’d had enough and wanted to find something better.
So, I bought a used Mac on EBay, just to confirm that it would work for my needs. It did and after about a month I bought a brand new MacBook Pro. I was then able to install Parallels, install Windows on my Mac (for a few apps, namely Quickbooks) and have both on it Guess what? After a month, I only use the Windows side on Parallels for accounting or testing websites on internet explorer.
My wife had never used a Mac and she isn’t nearly as technically educated as I am, yet I gave her my old mac laptop with no training. Two days later I came home and she had printed about 20 pictures using iPhoto and our wireless printer. It’s been a month and she loves it and guess what? It’s never crashed, nor had any problems. Another convert.
I’m the last person who would have expected to switch, but I did and I couldn’t be happier. Macs used to have 3% of the OS market, now they are around 7%. Why? Because they work. Simple.
What’s the lesson here? I see two of them: 1. Develop a superior product, market it well (as opposed to IBM’s O/S 2) and even with a company that seems to have a huge monopoly over you, you can gain market share. 2. Rest on your laurels, release products that upset consumers, and watch your market share fail.
It looks promising.
