Month: October 2005

Categories
Design Interface Technical

that clover flower pinwheel command thing

Today the spotlight slides onto the history of early user interface design.

A certain Steve Jobs some time ago mentioned the history of fonts on the Mac at the Stanford Commencement 2005 speech. Rumors of Jobs’ insatiable egoism notwithstanding, he laid claim to the existence of font technology on all computers. Of course, he didn’t actually design the appearance of the fonts so much as facilitate their implementation on the Mac. The initial design work was left to Susan Kare.

Susan Kare certainly has carved out her place in the annals of user interface design. Fortunate enough to design the well-made icons for the original Macintosh, she probably contritubed more than anyone could truly foresee to the popularity of computers today. Icons were a daring metaphor in a 1980s world of “serious” text and terminals, but the risk was well worth the reward. Ask any computer user today how legitimate icon-based interfaces are and you’ll always get the same affirmation. Everyone simply likes pretty things, and even more so when they help them get things done in an intuitive way.

Kare’s font credits include Monaco and the nostalgic original iPod font (originally “Elefont“, now known as the demised Chicago) Command Key flower. Kare even worked for Microsoft too on early versions of Windows.

P.S. Mac still has a few cool quirks with its typography engine (checked up to 10.4.2). Try opening up TextEdit, switching to the Zapfino font, and typing…”Zapfino” of all things. Cool.

Categories
General

The Internet is down?

The Internet is a well established entity these days. When was the last time “the Internet” was down? Exactly.

But while we are used to the physical networks resilience to all sorts of technical, human, and political problems, there is one crucial service running on these networks that is largely unregulated – DNS and the root servers. These are the servers that popularized the Internet as we know it, letting people go to google.com instead of having to memorize 216.239.57.99.

If you control these servers, you effectively control a huge part of what makes the Internet so useful. These servers, currently operated by the United States, are facing pressure to be transfered to international control and increase accountability for everyone involved.

I found a pretty interesting take on how badly managed the existing system has become, and what needs to change to make accountability a factor.

The system has worked so far because everyone has been reasonable at compromise, but it’s current state is fragile. The author raises the alarmist sounding but still possible scenario: Imagine a nation who declares war on the US, and consequently has its VoIP traffic intercepted because skype.com resolved into a US military intermediary for that country’s network addresses? The DoD already runs root server G and the Army H – the technical know how is certainly there.

The future of what we know of as the Internet is potentially in for some changes.

Categories
Technical Visit This Site

Color laser printer conspiracy? Not anymore.

Serious props to the EFF guys for cracking this.

I had heard about this inter-governmental-corporate scheme for a few years, but since I’ve never owned a color laser printer didn’t have much of an opportunity to check it out.

The way they cracked it is a pretty tricky technique, but determing the parity bits was a big help in separating data from structure. Hooray for reverse engineering!

Categories
Technical Visit This Site

One day…

…Linux will be viable on the desktop. On this day, Microsoft and Apple will actually be worried about an upwards kink in the slowly growing curve of Linux marketshare. But first, Windows Vista and Mac OS X86 will arrive with interfaces that ‘just work;’ where the computer gets out of the way and takes care of the semantics.

Linux will always be huge in the realm of IT and CS users. It fosters programmers in a way that Windows can’t really do – but the cost is a huge degree of user unfriendliness.
So with this contemporary 2006 scenario in mind, programs like NetworkManager that simply make existing technology “just work” are big deals.

I think programs like this one reveal just how technically and culturally difficult it is to create technology that “just works” for Linux. The majority ofsoftware operates within one “layer”: Userspace, daemonized, or in the kernel (modules).