kaioa.com

Crispy glyphs.

Some of you might have seen FontStruct over at Slashdot. It was at the front page yesterday or the day before. The usual thing happened of course - it got slashdotted to death. Fortunately it's back online. It's time to give it a shot.

In a nutshell: FontStruct is a web-based font creation tool. Apart from a few minor issues the Flash-based interface is perfect. It's surprisingly awesome in fact. Well, it's not intended to be used for professional font creation; it doesn't handle kerning or hinting for example. There aren't even any vector tools (all you get is a set of building bricks). But all those things aren't really necessary for less-serious/pixel fonts.

There shall be structure.

Benefits

Hierarchical structures are always rather hard to explain with words alone. You've to identify the key items and then lay out their relation to each other - two at a time. This can take a couple of sentences and you'll also have to carefully check if everything is at the right place.

But it doesn't stop there. The worst part is probably that every user will have to parse your explanation very carefully. Of course that only adds a few seconds to the whole process, but those seconds accumulate. Your thousands (or even millions) of users might have done something more important during that time. They could have picked their nose for example, which is an activity many people enjoy more than reading documentation.

Yes, it's true. Reading documentation is really that exciting. So, we really should try everything possible to make it as quick and pain free as possible.

This should be easy, right? Well, for reasons unknown to me it isn't. Win2k/98/95 got two sliders: one for sensitivity and one for acceleration. This was great. This was easy. WinXP, however, assumes you always want to use some degree of acceleration - unless you're using the lowest sensitivity setting, which is quite frankly unusable. This is really irritating - especially if you consider that people who disable acceleration typically use a rather high sensitivity. There is only one slider which controls both settings and there is a check box, which can be used to "improve" the sensitivity... whatever that means.

Why am I writing about this anyways? There should be zillions of pages about that topic, shouldn't it? Well, while that's true all I saw so far only contain some nonsense. And they all copy&pasted from each other. Gee. That really helps.

mmm... crispy sectors

It's toast

The weekend started with a premonition. Well, maybe "bad omen" is more accurate. Some rather bad SQL errors showed up, but they were sorted out quickly. The next day the site disappeared. "403 - forbidden", it said. That's just great. Did I already mention that I'm amazingly unlucky these days?

Page 403s, FTP says the password is wrong, but email works. So, I waited for the phone support hours to start. Gee. Fast forward about an hour and I got some techy to talk to. Apparently some HDD failed, it got replaced, some files were wiped (well, all of them - except for some now empty directories), and some access rights were nuked as well.

A low poly spaceship

Without net access there wasn't much to do. However, modeling was one of the few things I actually could do. Fortunately I had some recent version of Wings3D installed. A few futile attempts later I got something that looked alright. Semi-satisfied with my low poly (52 polygons, 104 edges, 54 vertices) spaceship I went ahead texturing it with Inkscape.

Since the intended rendering size is rather small there isn't a need for fine details. I also wanted to try some bold semi-futuristic look with a touch of military blandness. Using vectors seemed like the most natural choice. Hard vector edges also fit the flat shaded rendering a lot better.

Before I could start with the texturing I had to do the UV mapping first. UV mapping is a bit annoying in Wings3D, but it's alright for simple models. If you aren't familiar with the term: it's about which part of the texture goes where on the model.

*plop* :'(

I'm actually not dead

Just a bit unlucky. Twice in a row. Being without net access for about 2 weeks is somewhat akin to a new experience. I can't really remember how I did things before the internet. Almost everything I do requires a working connection. I need it for documentation, looking up synonyms/words, downloading/updating libraries/frameworks/compilers, bouncing ideas around, etc.

Everything seems to depend on it. Heck, I couldn't even make phone calls. Maybe I should get one of those annoying mobile phones. Meh.

Not everything was bad though. Having a few days without any PC running wasn't all that bad. I also got around playing some games. No More Heroes (Wii) and God of War 2 (PS2) were actually pretty entertaining. So, I'll dive into that for now.

I can't hear you

Motivation

A few weeks ago someone complained about screencasts being (ab)used as replacement for documentation. I think I saw it somewhere over at reddit or dzone. Well, that rant wasn't all that interesting, really. However, it did point out two real issues: they are useless to the deaf and you lose the advantages of text (searchable, quick scanning etc.). I can't agree more with those bits - it's something that bothered me for ages.

The former can be addressed with subtitles. The latter, however, is more complicated than that. Solving that problem would also solve the issue that screencasts don't really reveal much of their content to search engines. If you put countless hours of work into your screencasts it would be pretty sad if your audience is unable to find them.

Interestingly subtitles are also the solution to this problem. Once they are written (or copy/pasted from the script) you have a complete transcript together with the timing information. With those two pieces (text and time) you can create a transcript where each line can be clicked to seek over to that position.

Inkscape 0.46 is finally out of the door and there are builds for all platforms (well, the important ones) available. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get this little executable into the Win32 builds. If you've read my previous posts you might have an idea what it's all about.

In a nutshell it's a tiny console application, which spawns Inkscape (with the specified arguments) and captures its stdout (default output) and stderr (default error output) streams and redirects it to this console. It also does the same with stdin for good measure. It's sole purpose is direct command line interaction (and determining which actions trigger GTK warnings). If you want to spawn Inkscape from other programs/scripts use inkscape.exe instead.

So, with this little application we get something that behaves like a console build of Inkscape, which means that we actually get some feedback if we're using some command line switches. All that for a mere 21kb. For comparison: a separate Inkscape build would have added another 12.5mb.

Just finished upgrading this site. The upgrade went well on my test server and fortunately it also went well here. There was some odd issue with phpMyAdmin's backup though. Everything is UTF-8, nevertheless the dump started with the following line:

CREATE DATABASE `foo` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci;

Swedish? Well, "latin1" was already totally off, but that? Uhm.

Well, it was good for a laugh. Fortunately the dump itself was still UTF-8 encoded and everything was fine - after getting rid of that really weird line, that is.

Whenever you're creating some user interfaces you'll often have to recreate/reinvent some concepts. Things you've seen a zillion times. Usually this isn't much of a problem, but sometimes you forget specific usability details, which can degenerate the user experience quite a bit.

Anders Toxboe's website UI-Patterns.com fills the gap by providing dozens of examples for common UI crafting tasks. Each one is illustrated and explained in detail. Additionally, everything is categorized which makes it easy to find related patterns.