RSSMix.com Mix ID 5449

Social software and participatory learning: Pedagogical choices with technology affordances in the Web 2.0 era

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:16:05 -0400

McLoughlin, C. & Lee, M. (2007). Social software and participatory learning: Pedagogical choices with technology affordances in the Web 2.0 era. ICT: Providing choices for learners and learning. Proceedings ascilite Singapore 2007Somewhat breathless about the Web 2.0 hype.Social software tools such as blogs, wikis, social networking sites, media sharing applications and social bookmarking utilities are [...]

Notes: Social software for life-long learning

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:32:48 -0400

Klamma, R., Chatti, M., Duval, E., & Hummel, H. (2007). Social software for life-long learning. Educational Technology & Society (2007) vol. 10 (3) pp. 72-83Abstract:Life-long learning is a key issue for our knowledge society. With social software systems new heterogeneous kinds of technology enhanced informal learning are now available to the life-long learner. Learners outside [...]

Notes: Personal Learning Environments-the future of eLearning?

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:18:43 -0400

Attwell, G. (2007). Personal Learning Environments-the future of eLearning?. E-Learning Papers. vol. 2 (1)The idea of a Personal Learning Environment recognises that learning is continuing and seeks to provide tools to support that learning. It also recognises the role of the individual in organising their own learning. Moreover, the pressures for a PLE are based [...]

Notes: Personal digital libraries: Creating individual spaces for innovation

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:07:55 -0400

Borgman, C. (2003). Personal digital libraries: Creating individual spaces for innovation. NSF Workshop on Post-Digital Libraries Initiative Directions (2003)This is an article about the design of digital libraries to support innovation, but has some implications as it discusses monolithic vs. individual applications in an educational environment.The digital libraries of today (and the near future) tend [...]

Notes: Blogs@ anywhere: High fidelity online communication

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:52:38 -0400

Farmer, J. & Bartlett-Bragg, A. (2005). Blogs@ anywhere: High fidelity online communication. ascilite 2005: Balance, Fidelity, Mobility: maintaining the momentum? pp. 197-203This article has some really great citations. Be sure to mine them.Abstract:Since early 2001 several institutions and many individual teachers have incorporated blogging into their online pedagogical strategies. During this time, weblog (blog) publishing [...]

merging feeds

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:32:41 -0400

I had been filtering out a couple of categories from the main feed on my blog. Asides and Coursework. Each had their own separate feed, and I wasn’t wanting to pollute the main feed with noise. But, strangely, people are asking why I don’t just let everything flow into the main feed.Fine. It’s all in [...]

Notes: The Social Shaping of a Virtual Learning Environment: The Case of a University-wide Course Management System

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:15:14 -0400

Dutton, W.H., Cheong, P.H., & Park, N. (2004). The Social Shaping of a Virtual Learning Environment: The Case of a University-wide Course Management System. Electronic Journal of e-learning. vol. 2 (2) pp. 69-80A characteristic of higher education culture throughout the world is that instructors generally teach the way they were taught: using a traditional one-many [...]

Social Learning Environment Manifesto

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:49:35 -0400

Matt Crosslin reinvents the personal learning environment, and calls it the social learning environment. Not to sound snarky, but isn't that what this sounds like: "This class will be assigned a unique tag, such as 'eng1301sp10.' This tag will be connected with the class on the SLE server.... The SLE will then troll through all of the RSS feeds for each connected service the student has added, looking for unique course tags." It's still a good idea, but I thing Crosslin would benefit from talking to people like Scott Wilson, Graham Attwell and Tony Hirst (and maybe looking at how we ran the Connectivism course. Or maybe this PLE paper, one of the many resources reposted by D'Arcy Norman's blog today (heh). Matt Crosslin, EduGeek Journal, March 18, 2010 [Tags: Connectivism, RSS] [Link] [Comment]

Notes: Personal learning environments (ICALT06)

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:37:18 -0400

Van Harmelen, M. (2006). Personal learning environments. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT’06)Abstract:Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) are attracting increasing interest in the e-learning domain. PLEs may be characterised in a multidimensional space. Examples of PLEs are discussed.this is a very short paper, outlining some examples of PLEs.There is increasing awareness [...]

Design Intersections: How Games Can Help Us Solve the World's Biggest Problems

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:33:36 -0400

Pretty good slide show on the impact and potential of games to support learning and change. The slides, by Jane McGonigal, refer to "World Without Oil" and "Evoke" (which I've been following as it moves into its third week online) as examples of massive multiplayer games that can support change. But what change? Whose change? I see the stamp of the World Bank all over Evoke, which to me creates challenges of bias and perspective. And there is the danger that these presumptions are implicit in games (see my post Sensitize / Desensitize for a summary of these concerns). More slide shows from McGonigal. If you have lots of time for TED eye-candy you can watch a video of one of her talks. Here's her most recent post on Evoke. Jane McGonigal, Slideshare, March 18, 2010 [Tags: Online Learning, Video] [Link] [Comment]

Notes: The use of blogs, wikis and RSS in education: A conversation of possibilities

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:21:27 -0400

Duffy, P., & Bruns, A. (2006). The use of blogs, wikis and RSS in education: A conversation of possibilities. Proceedings Online Learning and Teaching Conference 2006. pp. 31-38.Abstract:In a socially mobile learning environment, it is no longer sufficient to use online learning and teaching technologies simply for the delivery of content to students. A digital [...]

Learner Centered Methodology A New Approach to Effective Learning

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:11:40 -0400

What I like about this paper is that it is a clear and fairly detailed description of how learner input can be incorporated into an instructional design process. And I think that the author makes the case that the methodology can be used to create a pretty good course. What it leaves me wondering, though, is what happens when the current set of learners moves on and a new cohort moves in. Do you redesign the course from scratch? Probably not (to judge by the description of the process as a "one-time cost"). But then, is the course "learner centered" from the perspective of this new cohort? Geeta Bose, learnability matters, March 18, 2010 [Tags: Traditional and Online Courses] [Link] [Comment]

Personal knowledge management & wisdom

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:03:52 -0400

Harold Jarche offers some useful clarifications to his model of personal knowledge management. In particular, he takes pains to say "there is no procedural method to go from data to wisdom... Data does not create information; information does not create knowledge and knowledge does not create wisdom. People use their knowledge to make sense of data and information. People create information that represents their knowledge, which can then be more widely shared." Harold Jarche, Weblog, March 18, 2010 [Tags: Knowledge Management] [Link] [Comment]

Project Based Learning (With FREE Online Tools)

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:59:52 -0400

This is a wiki page containing an outline and resources for a session on problem based learning using free web-based tools. It could probably use more resources (you could help by adding some), but has a selection scattered through a pretty good organization of material on the subject. Via Miguel guhlin. Mark Wagner, pbwiki, March 18, 2010 [Tags: none] [Link] [Comment]

The NAACE Annual Conference

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:51:48 -0400

Summary of the NAACE conference in Britain and in particular links to some free Microsoft software. The experienced will likely be familiar with things like Moviemaker and photosynth, but things like pptPlex - display effects for your PowerPoints - are new to me (you might not think so, but I don't really explore a lot of desktop software beyond the basics, because I'm so web focused). NAACE, by the way, appears to stand for "National Association of Advisors for Computers in Education" (I had to look it up here, because the full name appears neither in the article or on their website - I guess everybody (but me) just knows. Naace is "the professional association for those who are concerned with advancing education through the appropriate use of information and communications technology (ICT). Naace was established in 1984 and has become the key influential professional association for those working in ICT in education." No hyperbole there! Related: Steve Wheeler reacts, saying "let's stop calling it ICT... it's learning technology." Ray Fleming, Microsoft UK Schools, March 18, 2010 [Tags: Schools, Great Britain, Experience, Project Based Learning, Microsoft] [Link] [Comment]

Blackboard's Patent is Down to its Last 30 Days

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:19:09 -0400

There's still life in the old Blackboard "138" patent - even if it is on life support. There's a final appeal that is possible, and I hope someone is on this to make sure an appeal is opposed, now that the Desire2Learn involvement in the case has essentially ended. Jeff Bohrer, BohrerED - notes about academic technology, March 18, 2010 [Tags: Desire2Learn, Patents, Copyrights, Blackboard Inc., Patents] [Link] [Comment]

2,000 posts

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:54:26 -0400

this post is the 2,000th one published to my blog. wow.

Game guru Sid Meier explains gamer psychology

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:49:19 -0400

Some really good stuff on the psychology of gaming. Sid Meier, who gave the keynote address at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, has this to say: ""Game play is a psychological experience," Meier said. "It's all in your head. I thought the more realistic you made a game, the more historically accurate, [the more] the player would appreciate it. In reality, I was wrong." The same applies for user input. "One of the biggest skills that game developers can foster is listening to what players are really saying. This means you don't have to take their suggestions literally, but interpret them so that you know what they really want." See also GamaSutra. Related, but on a different note, this saga of a gameplay experience in Far Cry 2 (note the sophisticated logic and interaction). Civ links via Civ Fanatics, the other link via Metafilter. Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat, March 17, 2010 [Tags: Experience, Gaming, Interaction] [Link] [Comment]

Need Much Much More "D" in Education R & D

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:35:35 -0400

The problem, in my mind, is not that learning resources are not being developed, but rather, that so many of the resources that are developed are not being used in learning. For just about any subject you care to name, the internet is overflowing with learning re4sources. Long videos, short videos, academic papers, how-to guides, opinion pages, blog posts, discussions and groups and clubs and everything else under the sun. When people like Tony bates say, "there is still so little of it. What I would like to see are many thousands of short modules," he must mean resources specifically designed to be used in classes. But that's not how the internet rolls. Nothing is designed for a specific purpose. People throw stuff out there, and then it's up to everyone else to make what they will of it. Doug Holton, EdTechDev, March 17, 2010 [Tags: Video, Academia, Web Logs] [Link] [Comment]

Three Models of Knowledge Production

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:15:05 -0400

I wrote this post today partly in reaction to Harold Jarche's post on personal knowledge management and partially - as I developed a full head of steam - in preparation for the talk I gave this afternoon. The three models are:
- knowledge production as mining
- knowledge production as construction
- knowledge production as growth
While arguably elements of all three models are required for a robust account of knowledge production, my inclination, for various reasons, is to place the most emphasis on the third. Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, March 17, 2010 [Tags: Knowledge Management] [Link] [Comment]

Decentralized Learning

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:18:37 -0400

[Slides][Audio] In this online presentation for APOP (Association for the Educational Application of Computer Technology at the Post-Secondary Level-Montral) I discuss the concept of decentralized learning. I begin with the physical model, as instantiated in the Connectivism course, then outline the epistemology of knowledge production, then describe the pedagogy of personal learning, and conclude with success factors. A long Q&A in which we discuss numerous issues follows. APOP (Association for the Educational Application of Computer Technology at the Post-Secondary Level-Montral), Montreal, Online via the Via Conferencing System (Seminar) March 17, 2010 [Comment]

Educause 2010

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:45:52 -0400

Case study - in a nice Prezi presentation - of WordPres MU implementation at Bowling Green. The BGSU Blogs site is used not just by students but a wide variety of campus services, such as Blackboard tutorials and one of the featured case studies, the Worlf Viewing Centre for videos. Terence Armentano, EDUCAUSE, March 17, 2010 [Tags: Video, EDUCAUSE, Blackboard Inc.] [Link] [Comment]

Implementing Unified Communications in Higher Education

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:28:24 -0400

Presence is the key, say the authors of this presentation on unified communications. The argument is compelling: instead of paying large sums to expand the capacities of our telephone, we should integrate communications with the computer devices we use. This allows not only voice and video, but also conferencing and calendaring. Status indicators - similar to what we see in Skype and other such tools - let callers know when answerers are available and willing to talk. The major challenge, note the author, is at the edges: adapting to the individual configurations of the users, especially those outside the corporate firewall, who may be using a wide range of configurations. Victor Martinez and Danny Smith, EDUCAUSE, March 17, 2010 [Tags: Audio Chat and Conferencing, Conferencing, Video, Security Issues] [Link] [Comment]

I Am .CA

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:26:26 -0400

This is a video I created as an entry for the CIRA Show us your .ca contest. I had a pretty hard time with this, partially because I was fighting the technology and partially because I was coming down with what would turn out to be a nasty cold. I wanted to focus more on the website and less about me, but this is what I was able to put together. Stephen Downes, YouTube, March 16, 2010 [Tags: Video] [Link] [Comment]

A Conversation on Social Learning

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:22:01 -0400

[Audio] Conversation with a group in Holland about recent developments in social learning. I focused mostly on the idea that the intent of social learning is to generate practice and experience with idea of growing or developing personal capacity (as opposed to learning as the 'transfer' of knowledge). We also talked quite a bit about the use of social networks and communities as a mechanism for evaluating learning. Participants were: Eline Noorberger, David Berg, Gerlinde Podt, Christine Marck-Apperloo, Jan Nieuweboer. LearningWave, Holland, via Skype (Seminar) March 16, 2010 [Comment]

The intentional marginalization of blogging in the corporate learning sector

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:48:00 -0400

Janet Clarey calls out corporate learning magazines for their marginalization of the blogosphere. Just as academic journals systematically disregard the work being done in the blogging community, she writes, "I do think there's the same "marginalization of blogging" (Groom writes about) and the failure to give credit where credit is due. There's (still) a certain respect associated with corporate learning periodicals (and many are very, very good and include those that blog) but I often get the feeling that when something is written on a blog (vs. within an article) it's not taken seriously." Janet Clarey, Weblog, March 16, 2010 [Tags: Academic Publications, Academic Journals, Online Learning, Academia, Web Logs] [Link] [Comment]

An OLPC News Rebuttal to @TMSruge's Africa 3.0 Speech

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:42:09 -0400

Pretty interesting back-and-forth about whether OLPC is a "failed solution." A good part of the argument revolved around whether OLPC is another neo-colonialist solution for Africa, and whether giving computers away, instead of adopting a market solution, is the best approach. I would observe that a good part, indeed most, OLPC work took place in South America and Asia. Is it neo-colonialist? Kinda. On the other hand I note the complete failure of the "marketplace" to provide anything like low cost internet access or computing in the developing world before OLPC. Mobile phones, which must be used instead, are a very expensive and closed alternative. Wayan Vota, OLPC//News, March 16, 2010 [Tags: Africa] [Link] [Comment]

Global Self-Paced eLearning Market Forecasts

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:23:45 -0400

A report from Ambient suggests that the market for self-paced learning will double by 2014. "It estimates the market had reached US $27.1 billion in 2009. The demand is growing at a 5 year compound annual growth rate of 12.8% and will take the world market to US $49.6 billion by 2014." Amit Garg, Upside Learning Blog, March 16, 2010 [Tags: none] [Link] [Comment]

Isolation

You probably experience this on a regular basis: a client sends you an illustration or a logo they'd like to use in a project, but it's a low-res bitmap or a flat image file with a background texture. Or both, if you're really lucky. Sure, you can try and ask for a vector version, but more often than not what they originally sent was the best copy they had on hand.

I seem to have made something of a hobby out of trying to coax useful results out of this type of file. Over the years I've stumbled across far better ways of doing it than manually clipping the background with the the magic wand or various selection tools.

For the next time you're handed a less-than-ideal source image, here are a few of my tricks for isolating the part of the file I want to work with in Photoshop.

I'll use this Firefox promo image as an example. Yeah, I know I can find a vector version of this particular logo online, but it makes for a fairly good demo thanks to the complexity of the background.

Let's start with the text. A single, flat colour ends up being fairly easy to extract. The first step is using the Hue/Saturation sliders [Ctrl / Cmd + U] to drop the saturation all the way down to a value of -100:

Then trim away the surrounding pixels to focus on the area you want:

Next use the levels sliders [Ctrl / Cmd + L] to increase the contrast on either side so that the background is black and the text is white. The trick is doing it in a way that doesn't completely kill the anti-aliasing between the text and the background, while at the same time making sure the foreground/background colours are pure black and white. You don't want stray pixels on either side, otherwise nasty things will happen later on when you try using your results. If you just can't find a balance, use the brush tool to fill in the strays manually.

The best results come from images where the text is clearly a different shade than the background behind it. In this case it is, so I'm able to get a reasonably high-contrast result:

At this point you have two choices. If you don't need the ability to change the colour of the text or apply layer effects, you can stop now and set the layer's blending mode to Screen or invert it (Ctrl / Cmd + I) and set the mode to Multiply. With the either of those blend modes you should be able to place this high-contrast layer over top of a background and it'll be treated as isolated text. The key being placing it on top of non-transparent background; if there are no pixels beneath for the layer to blend with, you won't be able to save it out the same way it renders in Photoshop.

For that extra control you need to take it further. By holding down Ctrl / Cmd and clicking on the image's layer in the Layers palette you can select just the outline; copy that to the clipboard, open the Channels palette, create a new Channel, and then paste the clipboard into that channel. If you've done it right it should look something like this:

Figure: Ctrl/Cmd + clicking on the channel produces selection marching ants in the preview. You can't see the animation, but they're there.

The same way you selected the outline of the image in the Layers palette, you can Ctrl / Cmd + click in the Channels palette and the selection will change to just the border between the background and foreground. If you switch back to the Layers palette and create a new Solid Color fill layer:

The text now sits on an isolated layer that allows you to easily change the colour, apply layer effects, etc.

The icon is more complicated. We've got a strong orange foreground, but the globe and the background share some tones so extracting is going to be trickier. This is a fairly common scenario in the wild, but the good news is that it's still doable in most cases.

Let's be a little more selective about what we're trying extract this time. Start by focusing on the orange fox for now, we'll come back for the globe. The Select > Color Range tool allows you to click an area and select all colours similar to that selection point, and the Fuzziness slider controls how loosely or tightly the selection matches that colour. Selecting the blue area instead of the orange produces a much higher-contrast outline of the orange area:

Once you hit okay you're left with marching ants. The selection isn't useful yet, so back to the Channels palette we go. Create a new alpha channel and fill the selection with white:

Now you can just pull up the Levels palette and, with the same high-contrast result in mind as the previous text example, adjust the levels until the fox is pure black and the background is as pure white as you can make it:

If you hit Ctrl / Cmd + click on the channel then head back to the Layers palette and select the original, you can click the Add Layer Mask button in the bottom of the palette and have the selection mask the image to just the orange areas we've managed to extract:

If you end up with too many fringe pixels from the background, you can hit Ctrl / Cmd + select the mask again, and use the Select > Modify > Contract tool to decrease the selection 1px on all sides. Invert this smaller selection with Ctrl / Cmd + Shift + I, then select and fill with black the layer mask to apply it. This will eat up a one pixel outline around the object, which should take care of the fringe without tossing out too much image data. Though it does depend on the size of the source image.

We now want to add the globe back in, so duplicate the layer and remove the mask to show the original image again. Manually trace the outline of the globe with the circular marquee tool, select the masked layer and fill that selection with white within the mask. And there we go, an isolated version of the Firefox icon that you can manipulate as you please:

Extraction this way seems like a lot of work, but once you get the hang of it you'll find it's fairly quick work to go from a source image to something usable.

For relatively simple jobs like the text, the process is straightforward and can be done in a couple of seconds. For more complicated extraction as in the case of the icon, creative alpha masking combined with a bit of manual tweaking will usually get the job done.

(And I don't have to remind you to always use this for good and never for evil, do I?)

Font Embedding Now

Currently one of the biggest stumbling blocks to embedded type on the web is of a legal nature rather than any genuine technological barrier. Most of the major browsers have now implemented the @font-face property, and between sIFR and Cufn there are also alternatives for providing non-standard typefaces to browsers that haven’t caught up yet.

So the technology that allows us to embed custom fonts is more or less here, but the licensing debate rages on. Richard Rutter and Simon Klein have written a great pair of posts summarizing the concerns some foundries have with embedding, while countless other opinions have come out in favour of both addressing and ignoring these concerns.

But this is really for the foundries and the browsers to figure out. What you or I think should happen probably isn’t going to change the outcome of the debate; only overall trends in the market have a hope of doing that. So it seems to me that if we want font embedding to take off sooner rather than later, a change in our own methods and expectations is in order. And maybe a little voting with our pocketbooks.

Designers — myself included — are hoping for a wide open playing field; that’s not going to happen yet. What we can have, however, is a larger field than the one we’ve been playing on. There are countless free fonts out there that have commercial-usage licenses which allow for embedding. Yeah, a lot of them (if not most) suck. But there are resources like FontSquirrel and the webfonts.info wiki that are collecting some of the better ones, and the list is only going to increase over time.

If I were to start using font embedding now by, say, designing sites that use only those fonts I know to allow embedding, it opens up my options and causes me to start seriously considering embedding as a legitimate tool in my toolbox. The available typefaces may be limiting, but they’re bound to be a step up from Georgia and Arial everywhere. If enough designers are doing the same, and font embedding becomes a fairly common practice on the web, the foundries may see that they’re effectively being ignored by this medium. Perhaps then we’ll start seeing some actual change.

I’m going to try it. Let’s see what happens.

(This article was set in Museo Sans, a typeface by Jos Buivenga using the Cufn library. There are clearly some problems with the latter, as noted in the comments below; I doubt I'll be setting full pages using Cufn, probably more like just headers. However, I decided to make an exception for this article for the sake of playing with it a bit.)

Profile Madness

I thought I had Adobe's colour profiles all worked out. I really did.

I'm sure they're great for photographers and print designers and so on. The problem is, on the web, we deal with browsers and image formats that don't support colour profiles. With a few exceptions, we can't use them even if we want to. That means an embedded profile is usually worse than a nuisance, it's actively harmful: when saving out JPGs and GIFs the colour often shifts from what's intended to something very different.

The answer seems to lie in turning off colour management for the RGB space, which helps when creating brand new source files. But what happens when an existing file has an embedded colour profile? How do you get that to render accurately when saved out to a web-friendly file format?

A couple of years ago I wrote up my best guess. Converting from whichever profile the source file uses to a generic monitor profile would get you closer to an accurate result when saved out as a GIF. If I have source imagery in sRGB, a quick convert to the generic "Color LCD" profile takes care of things.

And that's probably as far as most people will ever need to worry about. It's good enough for most web work. But I just stumbled across a problem that, while an edge case, has turned me around completely. I used to think colour profiles were a solved problem. Now I have to wonder whether I can ever rely on them.

Over the weekend I released a new, free mini-set of icons. This is the first time I've produced a Chalkwork set on a new computer; since I started working on the set a few years ago I had done everything on an iMac that I no longer own.

That's relevant because when I was originally struggling with this colour profile issue, my solution was to convert from sRGB to a profile called "Working RGB - iMac". I had embedded the results of that particular profile into an icon set with thousands of files, and going forward, I needed to continue using it to ensure any new sets would match my previous work. This is an icon family with a common palette; colour precision is pretty darn important.

I realized I needed to save out that profile somehow. There still doesn't seem to be a facility built in to save and load custom colour profiles as of CS4, but you are able to expose the numbers behind each profile by selecting it in the Convert To dialog, then immediately after selecting "Custom RGB". This pops up a new dialog with Gamma, colour temperature and so on. You can set these values manually using the same dialog, so I figured this was a roundabout way to save and load a profile.

Sometime last year I pulled out all these numbers and saved them on my hard drive as a text file that looks like so:

Name: Chalkwork IconsGamma: 1.80White Point: Custom          x        yWhite:  0.2819   0.2942Primaries: Custom         x        yRed:   0.6331   0.3404Green: 0.2855   0.5943Blue:  0.1273   0.0603

Armed with that file (which I don't understand in the slightest) and detailed instructions for myself about converting profiles and saving out the icons every time I produce an icon set, I figured I had my rear covered for the next time I wanted to do it. You can see where this is going: the profile above isn't even close on the new computer. I ended up spending an hour or so testing different profiles to find a new one that was closest to the original, and the one I had previously saved isn't it.

Below you'll see two icons saved to various profiles, the arrow is from an older set and the credit card is from the new set:

With the exception of the actual icon files on the far right, each is saved using my regular process: I took the raw, unprofiled pixels, converted to sRGB, then converted to the respective colour profile, then saved. (Though with the sRGB example I did convert back to a generic color LCD profile for the sake of rendering it accurately here.)

The differences seem a bit slight in some of them, so I've taken the blue outline colour and filled an entire block with it in this next image which more clearly shows the differences:

It took a lot of experimentation, but in the end it seems that Apple RGB is currently the closest match; even in the blue strips it's hard to see any difference, but there's a block above the word "Actual" which is slightly duller (#1C356C vs. #19366E) that shows the difference between the old icon save process and the new one. It's a slight difference, sure, but knowing that I can never match the older icon sets precisely is going to bug me.

So I'm really not sure what I've learned here. I think I fundamentally understand colour profiles at this point, but I don't seem to be able to duplicate past results using them. Is it a version difference between CS2 (what I used prior) and CS4 (what I'm using now)? Is it a hardware difference between two Macs? I thought the entire reason for profiles in the first place was to alleviate those issues. I need precision, but I don't seem to be able to achieve it.

My ideal of having a way of carrying a previous profile forward doesn't seem to exist, so I'm really not sure how to plan for future icon sets. My best guess is to hope that sRGB and Apple RGB stick around, and rely on them in the future; will my next Mac produce the same results that this one does? Who knows. I can't trust that what I just did this past weekend will work in the future. And that really bothers me.

Anyone from Adobe well-versed in colour profiles would be more than welcome to respond here.

Dear Adobe

In the spirit of Dear Adobe, I submit the following two minute Photoshop gripe:

As a sanity-check before posting I put this video out on Twitter, and received the following tidbits:

The lack of ability to paste a hex value appears to be a Mac-only bug, in Windows it works. (Thanks @cloudislands, @friskdesign)
Within the Save for Web & Devices dialog, if you use the eyedropper tool on the left to select a colour within the canvas, and then hit the Matte colour dropdown menu arrows and select Eyedropper Color, that works. (Thanks @kyleridolfo, @Yardboy, @bradleysepos

Illustrator to HTML5's Canvas

I've spent a bit of time playing around with HTML5's canvas element lately. It's a fun new toy and has a lot of potential to be useful. But the biggest headache I'm finding so far is the lack of authoring tools.

SVG has been around for ages, whereas Canvas is still relatively new. (Mozilla's Vladimir Vukievi has a good overview presentation of the differences between the two, and when and where to use each.) SVG support is built into plenty of graphic editing tools; Canvas support is so far sadly lacking, although Matt May pointed me to this YouTube video that shows off the upcoming Canvas support Adobe's CS5 suite will have, whenever it becomes available.

In the meantime, most of the Canvas demos we've seen thus far have mostly featured simple primitive shapes like lines and ellipses for good reason: it's too hard to build up a reasonably complex vector image by manually plotting bezier curves.

Over the past few days I've tried out various ways to get around this problem. I came up with two methods of taking vector shapes out of Illustrator and rendering them with Canvas, both involving an intermediate step as SVG first.

So to start, from Illustrator (or any other vector editing application capable of doing so) export your artwork to SVG. You'll find the SVG option in the Save As / Save a Copy dialog, and I've found the SVG profile you choose doesn't really make much of a difference (though for the sake of argument I've been using 1.1).

We'll use this happy little cloud image as our reference file:

(download the SVG file)

1) Manually

This method is only theoretical so if you're looking for the actual how-to, skip ahead to #2. I figure it might be worth writing this up anyway because, even though I couldn't get it working, perhaps it'll provide enough of a starting point for someone else to pick up where I left off and build a proper converter.

SVG and Canvas are both essentially vector drawing tools; Canvas is more pixel-oriented, but you are certainly able to plot lines and curves mathematically. Canvas is also limited to fewer primitive shapes, but there are obvious parallels between the two.

I spent a bit of time looking into the bezier commands in particular. In SVG, to plot a bezier curve, you do something like this:

  <path d="C x1,y1 x2,y2 x,y" />

In Canvas, it's this instead:

  ctx.bezierCurveTo(x1,y1, x2,y2, x,y);

Different syntax, but the same basic components: you're drawing a line from the current pen position to the x, y value, and before that you have two additional points (x1, y1 and x2, y2) that set your handles. (More SVG path commands, Canvas path methods.) It's worth noting that SVG is more forgiving about commas; each coordinate must be separated by a comma for the Canvas method, but they're strictly optional in the SVG example. This is relevant because Illustrator's SVG export seems to be wildly inconsistent about when and how many commas each command uses.

Given the similarities, I thought it might be fairly straightforward to manually tweak the SVG output into Canvas drawing functions. M becomes moveTo, C becomes bezierCurveTo, and so forth.

  <path d="    M 62.58, 31.96    c -0.711,0 -1.811,0.062 -3.181,0.165    c -0.566 -6.309 -5.862 -11.255 -12.318 -11.255    c -2.363,0 -4.564,0.675 -6.442,1.824 "/>

Becomes:

  ctx.moveTo(62.58, 31.96);  ctx.bezierCurveTo(-0.711,0,-1.811,0.062,-3.181,0.165);  ctx.bezierCurveTo(-0.566,-6.309,-5.862,-11.255,-12.318,-11.255);  ctx.bezierCurveTo(-2.363,0,-4.564,0.675,-6.442,1.824);

This did not work. I suspect the absolute vs. relative coordinate difference between SVG's c and C commands tripped me up, but after a half hour or so of poking around this was all I had to show for it:

Still, even if I'd have managed to get it right, I'd rather not have to manually massage my SVG output every time I want a new Canvas drawing. Which leads me to method #2.

2) Automatically

One of the main reasons I bothered to attempt a manual conversion in the first place was because after an extensive search it appeared that people are mostly interested in converting Canvas to SVG. There are very few articles and tools that cover going the other way, which is what we're after. Maybe I didn't come up with exactly the right search term, but I was finding so little I almost gave up entirely.

Then after one last shot in the dark, I managed to stumble across SVGToCanvas, a Java library that promised to do exactly what it sounds like, with a few disclaimers and a major caveat:

You need Java 6. Otherwise known as 1.6, this comes installed with Mac OS X Snow Leopard but previous versions will need to upgrade. I believe this is the download necessary for Leopard, if you're on an even older version you're on your own. No idea what the Windows situation is, but this might be a good place to start.
You need to run it on the command line. I know this will freak out some designers, but really, it's not terribly difficult.
You mainly get outlines for now. This would be the big ugly caveat. Sometimes you get colour and gradients, sometimes you get mixed-up colour and gradients, mostly you don't. Plan to re-add them manually. Hopefully this will work better in a future version of the library, but still, having outlines is a solid start.

Still with me? Great, go grab the JAR file and drop it on your hard drive somewhere easy to find. For now, probably best to drop it in the same folder with the SVG files you're going to convert.

Now, load up the terminal, and find your way to the same directory. Here's a quick command line primer that ought to get you going. The cd, ls, and pwd commands in particular are the ones you need.

(If you need a bit more help than that: put the SVG and JAR files in a folder on your Desktop called 'canvas'. When you open up the terminal, type this minus quotes: 'cd ~/Desktop/canvas'. Hit return. You're good, keep reading.)

Run the converter with the following command:

  java -jar svg2canvas.jar -o cloud.html cloud.svg

From left to right: we're invoking Java with the SVGToCanvas library, then by -o cloud.html we're specifying the output will be written to cloud.html, otherwise it just displays the output in the terminal (which can be handy if you'd like to just copy and paste without managing temporary files). Then finally at the end, cloud.svg is the input SVG file that we had previously generated from Illustrator.

That generates an HTML file which contains a canvas element and the Javascript necessary to render the cloud:

In this case it worked, though it added a stroke. When it's just the outline, you can restore the colour by manually tweaking the code. Add a fillStyle method before the draw, and a fill after:

  ctx.fillStyle(#4a6481);  ... (drawing commands here) ..  ctx.fill();

Not too difficult for simple shapes. I'd hate to have to manually re-add the subtle gradients for more complicated illustrations, but it's nice to know the outline conversion is fairly robust:

Figure: SVG original on the left, the converted Canvas version on the right.

One more thing: I'd recommend flattening the vector art as much as possible. Join shapes that can be joined, expand effects and compound paths and masks, and generally clean up the artwork to as few points as possible. Smaller file sizes, more chance of success upon conversion.

So there you go. It's still a fairly painful way to get your vector work into a canvas, but until we get some better tools or built-in support for our existing tools, it's one way to fill the gap.

Starting with @font-face

I've been using Cufn off and on since writing about font embedding back in May. It's a great hack, but browser progress since that time has been making me feel that the native CSS @font-face rule is becoming increasingly viable. Or, at least enough so that it seems like it's time to start dabbling.

Yes, I know of TypeKit. It's a great idea and there are some solid reasons to consider using it. But I'm still interested in using the native technology from time to time, which is where we begin.

Ignoring the licensing issues for now, the problems are those of syntax and technology. Syntax because Internet Explorer requires you to import a different file than every other browser. Technology because, well, Internet Explorer requires you to import a different file than every other browser.

If you just forget about IE for a minute then @font-face is surprisingly easy to use. Getting started requires a couple of lines of CSS and the right file in the right place. You can have a custom typeface imported into your page with just a little more work than applying a custom background image. Start with the @font-face declaration itself:

@font-face {  font-family: 'Museo Sans';  src: local('Museo Sans 500'), local('Museo Sans'),          url(MuseoSans_500.otf) format('opentype');}

What this is saying is: "hey browser, here's a font family called 'Museo Sans'. When you see reference to this font in the stylesheet please check whether the font exists on the user's local computer. If it doesn't then here's a file in OpenType format that you can use instead." I've specified two different faces for the local computer, both the generic family name (Museo Sans) and the specific weight I'd like to use (Museo Sans 500). This may not be strictly required depending on the typeface, but can't a bad idea.

Once you've defined the font-family all you have to do is reference it on elements you'd like to be rendered with it:

h1 {font-family: "Museo Sans", Arial, sans-serif;}

That's it, really. Firefox, Safari, Opera? The latest versions of these browsers all work like a charm.

It's when you remember that IE won't do anything with this that you start running into problems. Luckily, Paul Irish uncovered the magic voodoo incantation that selectively serves the right file to the right browser. The syntax is only marginally more complicated:

@font-face {  font-family: 'Museo Sans';  src: url(MuseoSans_500.eot);  src: local('Museo Sans 500'), local('Museo Sans'),          url(MuseoSans_500.otf) format('opentype');}

I'll leave the explanation of why that particular rule order is important to Paul's article, but suffice it to say this is the syntax you should be using. (Also related, Paul's Rich Typography presentation is worth spending some time flipping through.)

So that's the syntax part of the equation solved. But remember we also have a technological problem; IE doesn't do anything useful with OTF or TTF files. It requires a converted, proprietary (though proposed-to-be-open) format called EOT. If you have a TTF or OTF file, how do you convert it to EOT?

More on this in a follow-up post in the near future. I'll spoil the punchline right now: the official tool for doing so is a horrible piece of abandonware that might work if you get lucky (I didn't). The alternatives are largely arcane command line tools that, apparently, work for some (not me).

However, there is a way. It ain't pretty. But it has the advantage of actually working.

Switched

Ah, blogging: the new long-form Tweet. This morning I said:

retraining myself not to /> close img, input, and meta tags. It's an uphill battle.

Which received an instant string of responses asking, in a nutshell, “why?” So I clarified:

because I'm done with XHTML is why. Back to HTML 4.01 Strict for now, then HTML5 whenever that happens.

Which caused more replies and follow-up emails than I was really prepared for. People are still passionate about this stuff, which kind of surprised me.

So I'll take the luxury of a few more than 140 characters to expand my thoughts. Within the last few months — though I'd been intending to do so for much longer than that — I made the decision to switch all my client work starting point templates from XHTML over to HTML 4.01 and start delivering everything as plain old semantic HTML, minus the X.

The XHTML/HTML choice still seems to be a bit of a dilemma, with most having a fairly established opinion one way or the other. Some love XHTML for its strict syntax and easier learning curve, some despise it for being so misused by the average content producer.

I made the switch more because of overall trends. Six years ago, many of us thought XHTML would be the future of the web and we'd be living in an XML world by now. But in the intervening time it's become fairly apparent to myself and others that XHTML2 really isn't going anywhere, at least not in the realm that we care about. For me, a guy who builds web sites and applications for clients that have to work in today's browsers, XHTML2 is a non-issue. No browser support, no use to today's web authors. End of story.

And as a result, there seems to be a shifting of consensus from "XTHML is the future of the web" to "XHTML2 is pretty much never going to happen, looks like HTML5 is the pony to back now". For proof, just compare how fast the major browsers are implementing HTML5 features now to the significant steps they've made with XHTML2 over the past 5 years (hint: crickets are chirping).

Not to say that HTML5 doesn't have its own set of problems; I've been seeing a lot of the same blog posts you have regarding the difficulty of implementation today, and the working group issues plaguing its development. It's got a long ways to go. But if I were to make a bet on which of the two languages I'll be writing in ten or fifteen years, HTML5 seems like a safer bet.

So given that I've lost faith in XHTML, it doesn't make much sense to continue propagating it. I'm not ready to start working through the contortions needed to make my sites work with an HTML5 DOCTYPE yet, which leaves me with the most recent implemented version of the language. I may start writing HTML5-ready HTML 4.01 like Clear Left did for their UX London site, but until I get a better sense that HTML5 has arrived, 4.01 will do me just fine for the next four or five years.

Update: Jeff Allen points out in the comments that UX London does in fact use the HTML5 DOCTYPE. So, to clarify the above point: I may start writing pseudo-HTML5 markup using classes like Clear Left does, however I'm not quite ready to use the actual DOCTYPE as they did.

Keep in mind this is really just one opinion in the fray. I'm not necessarily right, I'm just offering my personal response to what I see as the trend.

Older Than...

For no particular reason, I present to you a list of things that were true on August 27, 2001:

The iPod, XBox, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Ubuntu, and Blu-Ray did not exist.
IBM was still in the PC business, Handspring was still around, and Blackberries were data-only devices with no telephone capabilities.
The Euro had not yet entered circulation, currencies like the Franc, Mark and Lira were still legal tender.
George Harrison, The Queen Mother, Gregory Peck, Barry White, Johnny Cash, Ronald Reagan, Ray Charles, Julia Child, Pope John Paul II, Johnny Carson, Steve Irwin, Gerald Ford and Michael Jackson were still alive.
SARS, Avian Flu, H1N1 were not in the common vernacular.
Enron and WorldCom were still in business.
Oil was $24/barrel, gold was $276/ounce, NASDAQ was at 1912.41, and the DOW was at 10,382.35.
The Concorde still flew.
The Petronas Towers were the tallest skyscrapers in the world. (They've been surpassed twice since.)
Lost and 24 had never aired, there were only four books in the Harry Potter series, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was still making movies.
Lance Armstrong had only won the Tour de France 3 times. (He went on to win 4 more.)
The most recent Boston Red Sox World Series win had been 1918 (which remained true until 2004).
The Netherlands was the only country in the world that legally recognized same sex marriages. (That stands at 7 now).
Charley, Ivan, Jeanne, Katrina, Dean, and Ike were not names associated with weather.
61 Extrasolar planets had been discovered. (Currently that's up to 424).
Pioneer 10 signals were still being received on Earth.

Updates

While it's been a fairly quiet summer around these parts, that doesn't necessarily mean I've been slacking off. Let's run down the list.

New Chalkwork Icons & Search

Back in June while sitting around recovering from some minor surgery, I spent a weekend producing a new free icon set for payments and ecommerce called, naturally, Chalkwork Payments. It highlighted a fairly obvious deficiency in the collection, so immediately after I set to work on a much larger commerce set. Creatively named Chalkwork Commerce of course.

Due to the growing size of the overall icon family (2500+ now), I decided a better way to find a specific icon was in order. So with a bit of PHP and metadata-creation elbow grease, I put together what I think is a fairly robust search tool that matches actions, metaphors, shapes, and colours.

Start with the fact that searching an image for context still isn't something computers are good at. Then factor in the subjective nature of what an icon stands for, and the way one image often means multiple things. I didn't really see a shortcut for doing the matching; it had to be a manual tagging job. I built a 110k index file that tags each icon in a dozen or so different ways. Here's one example:

Shipping (Ground) – action, ship, shipping, shipment, shipped, deliver, delivery, ground, truck, vehicle, automobile, lorry, lorries, cargo, wheel, tire, tyre, white, red

Hey, when you're off your feet recovering, you have a lot of time on your hands. I can't imagine I've covered every possible search, but that's good enough for now.

The funny thing is that I built this mainly as a sales tool, a way of saying look, I've got an icon that matches what you need even if it isn't labelled that way. But after launch it was pointed out it's also quite useful for people who have bought the icons, as a way of making those same connections since you probably don't have the entire list of what you've bought fresh in mind. Seems obvious in hindsight, but it was nice to have the work pay off in more than one way.

Processing

Back in June I sat in on a full day Processing workshop with local Flash and Processing wiz Jer Thorp. I've been seeing a lot of interesting work with data visualization happening lately, and given that the language was ported to Javascript last year, it seemed like a language I could spend some serious time digging into.

The workshop was a great way to kickstart an interest. I've spent the last month or two working up a small base of sketches (as each program is named) that are helping me work through the syntax, and more importantly the mental shift from designing for 2D text and images to the very different world of designing in 3D when change over time is a factor.

I haven't yet got to the point where I'm doing anything terribly useful with it, but that hasn't stopped me from documenting the progress on a new blog I set up to keep from cluttering this one with something decidedly un-web. Check out Ex Nihilo if you're interested in following along.

WallBlank

You might remember a post from last year called Producing, where I explored some options visual web designers have for creating products, aside from web and iPhone apps that require developer help.

Shawn Kelley took the idea to heart, and created a site called WallBlank that sells limited edition prints late last year. In a nice example of things coming full circle, he asked me to contribute one of the Processing sketches I've been working with. That's now for sale, you can buy one of a limited edition of 100 unique prints called "Bokeh Array".

This one was particularly fun because I figured it would be worth taking full advantage of Processing's generative abilities; each print is unique, though they share a common palette for consistency. Sounds tricky, right? Not exactly. Pressing a single button and getting 100 vector PDFs as output within a minute or two is just one of the many nice things about working with such a graphics-focused language.

Site Issues

It's possible you noticed over the past month this site's home page came and went a few times. Don't worry, it's not going anywhere.

My own fault most likely, but the Delicious API has been a bit problematic for me; the scripts I've been using to pull in remote data cache it, but despite an interval of a few hours between checking for new data, there seem to be some API calls leaking out during that interval that trigger throttling. Delicious has a low tolerance for that sort of thing, and every so often there just wasn't anything showing up.

Combine that with a lack of posts or relevant Flickr photos recently, and the Google Reader items I'm sharing not actually showing up, and the entire home page was affected for a little while.

The Google Reader issue was interesting; at first I thought maybe they had changed something in the totally unofficial API, but then I realized that when I'd bought and started using 1Password I'd converted all my important passwords over to 32 character strings of random nonsense and I just hadn't updated it.

Simple to fix, and problem solved. Now that I can arbitrarily share any item on the web in Google Reader I'll likely be relying on Delicious less anyway.

How am I liking 1Password, incidentally? Quite a lot. You know that nagging feeling that you really shouldn't be using the same password for every web service out there, and that back-of-your-mind worry that one compromised site could lead to a massive online identity takeover, and that you really should do something about it, but it's really just too much of a pain in the ass to bother remembering all these different passwords, and oh forget it I'll just keep using the same insecure password as always?

Yeah, that's gone. My passwords look like this now: t0zDIHYqam<n5jCFgqGVj&Y"q=dPKmvY — and every site I use has a unique one. I actually do feel safer.

AEA SF

And one last thing in amongst all the randomness today. Coming up in December I'm speaking in San Francisco at An Event Apart, which will be only my second speaking date of 2009. I've slowed down quite a lot this year, but AEA was a must. It's always an honour to share a stage with a roster of people like Jonathan Snook, George Oates, Andy Budd, Jeff Veen, and Jared Spool. AEA remains one of the best conferences in the business, and I hope to bring the proverbial awesome.

Want to come? Want a discount? I've got you covered. Use the code AEADSCSS when registering for $100 off. See you there.

WEFT-less

Last we left off, I'd just started going down the road of playing with @font-face, sans IE. This is the follow-up where we bring Internet Explorer back into the equation and look at the hoops we need to jump through to bring it in line.

A quick refresher: following a different path than every other browser out there, IE requires a custom-created, rights-managed font file called EOT (Embedded OpenType). The syntax to safely serve up an EOT to IE was shown in that previously-mentioned post. What we're covering here is, how in the world do you create an EOT file in the first place?

Well, there's WEFT, Microsoft's one and only tool for creating EOT files. Let's try WEFT, shall we? Go to Microsoft's site for WEFT and hit the download link. Wait, what's this business about Internet Explorer 4 and Windows 98? Uh-oh.

The most recent WEFT point release was in 2003, but if you look at the screenshots on the tutorial for the most recent major version, you might be able to guess what sort of an experience you're in for.

Figure: This is the era of browser WEFT was built during. Is that IE2? IE3? It's been so long I can't remember.

Obviously it's Windows-only. I grabbed a copy and tried it in Windows XP under Parallels. That went well:

Figure: No WEFT for you. And Windows apps with images as toolbar backgrounds? So Win95.

I've booted multiple virtual installations of Windows XP under Parallels, but that's the oldest version of Windows I have on hand (what a ridiculous phrase to type) and it simply doesn't want to run.

I have managed to use WEFT in the past. Back in the late part of the 90's when it was still somewhat fresh, I distinctly remember grabbing a copy and converting some fonts to EOT. I also remember the GUI being a confusing pile of hurt, and the process being anything but transparent.

Essentially, you need to point WEFT at the page you're trying to embed the fonts in, so a) it can create domain-specific hooks and only run on that site (good luck getting the EOT working locally or on a staging server), and b) so it can subset the character set to only the glyphs you're actually using. The former is an overly-restrictive attempt at DRM. The latter is actually useful for controlling file sizes, aside from the total lack of manual control.

Microsoft mentions on the download page that some people report it working in virtualized Windows under OS X, and I have heard independent reports of it working for other people. But I've also heard I'm not the only one in the not-working camp. I guess if you get it working, consider yourself lucky in a pyrrhic sort of way.

But anyway, forget WEFT. Microsoft has clearly long given up on it. Abandonware isn't going to solve today's modern web design problems, what else have we got?

Searching that problem turned up Edward O'Connor's post from a few months back about his experience installing command line tools that will ultimately generate EOT files.

At this point I'm going to cut a very long story short and say that, despite being fairly comfortable hacking around a Terminal window and installing remote packages and the like, I wasted almost a day doing this with nothing to show for it. I suspect there's nothing wrong with Edward's methods, but some OTF files seem to complicate things in a way it simply doesn't account for. Others reportedly work; the ones I tried didn't.

(As an aside: there are a few web-based tools out there that do similar without the command line hackery. TTF 2 EOT does what its name suggests, and there's a tool called Online Font Converter that supposedly converts OTF files to TTF and a few other formats. I'm not linking to that one because I'm a little suspicious of the site (AdSense-heavy, and the zip files it produced wouldn't open for me), but if you really want to find it just search for the capitalized title in the last sentence. But you're probably better of using FontSquirrel anyway, mentioned below.)

(As a second aside, you might be luckier than I was. You might be able to use any of these tools to go from OTF to EOT and wonder what in the world I'm talking about. Given that I'm definitely not the only one who had this problem, it seems likely that sooner or later you might run into a font that just doesn't want to convert. When that happens, keep reading.)

After spending that time hacking around in the Terminal I was ready to give up on the entire process of WEFT-less EOT files, and then Jonathan Snook happened to mention he had a method. A bit of dialogue resulted in my prodding him into doing a screencast, and voila:

Converting OTF or TTF to EOT

The really important bit here, the part that I couldn't get right before, is the manual adjustment in FontForge. The automated tools mentioned above in the OTF › EOT conversion chain don't account for the namerecord tweaking that seems essential to get an EOT rendering in Internet Explorer. I had previously installed a tool that converted TTF files into XML so I could pull off the namerecord change in text. No such luck. FontForge's awful XWindows GUI tool was the only thing that worked for me. No really, it's ugly; the UI is even worse than WEFT. But it happens to work, which is its saving grace.

Figure: FontForge in all its glory.

Also, between the time I started writing this post and now, FontSquirrel released a @font-face generator that appears to automate the whole process. I haven't had a chance to test yet, so it's unclear to me whether it fixes the namerecord problems or not. If so, great, but one reason to still consider using FontForge is its ability to manually delete glyph records. Being able to drop Greek characters, accents and diacritics, ligatures, and other glyphs that aren't typically used on an English-speaking site is handy when you have 100k+ OTF files that you'd like to embed.

Finally, a couple of related links I've found interesting:

Becoming a Font Embedding Master, also from Jonathan Snook
Where to Get Web Fonts from Tim Brown at Nice Web Type
Typotheque, a foundry that explicitly allows web licensing of their catalogue, hosts them, and offers a really interesting pricing model. Worth a look.

Universal Design & Technology with Ira Socol

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 21:59:11 -0500

I am pleased to announce the Ira Socol will be giving a publicly available presentation on Universal Design on Monday March 8/10, at 6:30 p.m. CST. This session is directed at our preservice teachers who are taking Disability Studies, but the presentation will be available to all interested attendees via this Elluminate link. Ira is [...]Related posts:

Session with Jon Mott & David Wiley

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:50:38 -0500

The Faculty of Education’s new open access journal, in education, is sponsoring a free webinar with two of our authors, Jon Mott & David Wiley. The webinar is scheduled for March 3rd, 2010 at 11 a.m. (CST). The event will be facilitated using Elluminate, a web conferencing tool. You can listen and/or participate using the [...]Related posts:

A Conversation With Severn Cullis-Suzuki

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:33:44 -0500

Severn Cullis-Suzuki will be our guest at the Faculty of Education, University of Regina this March 4th, from 7:00-8:30 p.m. CST. The title of the talk is “Education for Sustainability: Touching All Of Our Lives”. I will be live streaming the event at my Open Thinking Ustream Channel. We invite you to attend face-to-face [...]Related posts:

Power of the Positive

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:37:23 -0500

I am fascinated by PSAs. I am especially interested in what I believe to be a false assumption that the more graphic the ad, the more effective it will be in delivering its intended message to viewers. I can think of recent ads from the UK regarding txting while driving, and ads from Ontario on [...]Related posts:

No Child Left Thinking Dr. Joel Westheimer

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:41:29 -0500

Dr. Joel Westheimer is presenting a public lecture at the University of Regina on Monday, January 25th, 3:30-4:45 (CST). I will doing my best to stream the event live via this Ustream channel.Details of the session are found below.“No Child Left Thinking: Democracy at Risk in Canadian SchoolsDr. Joel Westheimer from the University of Ottawa [...]Related posts:

Role of Teacher Education We Need Your Help

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:34:56 -0500

Dean Shareski and I are presenting at Educon 2.2 in Philadelphia, and our topic is “(Re)Imagining Social Media & Technology in Teacher Education”. We are hoping to find individuals that will help us introduce the topic. More specifically, we are looking for insight in answering the following questions regarding the role of teacher education in [...]Related posts:

2010 Social Media Predictions aka Know your rights, aggregate & own your stuff and back it up

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:14:44 -0500

I have been blogging for 10 years, started Dec 1999 (dreadnet.editthispage.com which sadly died a few years back due to my own negligence) so some 2010 social media long term predictions and gratuitous advice which again is worth what you paid for it

Social Media 2010 predictions and gratuitous advice:

Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Tumblr and other walled gardens are over in the long term; an open solution will replace them in 5 years or less.
Don't be afraid to use and experiment with the walled gardens but recognize that your stuff can be deleted at any time and unless you have backed it up to an open format like HTML, it won't last forever (most likely scenarios: service goes out of business or your account is deleted for an arbitrary reason). I wouldn't shed a tear if all my tweets were deleted, YMMV. If you have fun with the walled gardens, get your domain and start a blog, videoblog,podcast, etc., you won't regret having an online presence you own and control
If you care about your closed garden stuff, back it up to an open format. If you aren't geeky enough to figure this out, ask a geek, there's lots of them, just don't ask me :-)
Have a "hook" and nurture and grow it. Not good enough in 2010 to be a jack of all trades social media whatevah :-) You actually need to *know* something. Most people do (they just don't realize it!) so that's not a problem.
Don't know why I have to write this in 2010 department: Don't trust reviews or content on Urban Spoon, Yelp (i like the idea of yelp & other aggregators but in practise most of the reviews are shall we say not helpful), Gowalla, Facebook etc unless you know the person in real life or have read their stuff over a period of time. Most restaurant reviews like most content on the Internet are wildly biased but that's a good thing because objectivity in food reviews is ridiculous.
Get your most valued content out of the walled gardens and your email (email rocks but it's not a place for long term knowledge storage and retrieval) and back it up. The best way to back up is to put the content in an open format like HTML on your own domain and backup all the stuff on your domain. Again, ask a geek. And really most people's stuff that is truly valuable is not a lot, myself included :-) e.g. I bet my best emails, best photos, videos and blog posts for the last 5 years could fit on 1 DVD!

2010 Mobile Tech Predictions

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 20:30:25 -0500

Hard to believe that I didn't make any predictions in 2009 (my 2008 predictions)!

Herewith again some randomly ordered Mobile predictions which are worth what you paid for them!

Mobile

Google will introduce a "comes with data" mobile phone featuring an easy environment to write HTML5 & JS apps
A Canadian mobile phone carrier will actually sell mobiles other than the iPhone that have current software & aren't 6-12 months old :-) The current "sell old phones with old firmware with bogus customizations" model of Rogers, Bell and Telus will be over in 2011.
Apple's tablet will be introduced, it wil be big seller and a great creator and consumer of multi-media and it will be closed and have the iPhone App Store model rather than the Mac app model.
Nokia will deliver Maemo 6 and an N900 successor but it won't be good enough for the mainstream but will be awesome for me & other mobile devs because mobile Firefox will offer superior HTML5 and JS experience (yes working for Mozilla I am biased :-) !)
The next iPhone will boast a 5 mega pixel camera and other still and video imaging improvements which will be more than good enough for old cameraphone snobs like me and accelerate Nokia's decline among mobile multimedia creators.
Mozilla Messaging (my employer!) will introduce a version of Raindrop that doesn't require you to do geeky things like install things like CouchDB yourself and it will rock on Android, Maemo and any other modern open mobile web environment (sorry Blackberry, iPhone and Symbian but you lose since you are all neither open or modern or both :-) !) Just kidding, it will rock on any modern mobile web browser open or closed methinks :-) !

Student Work Fall 2009

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:25:13 -0500

I truly enjoyed teaching both my graduate and undergraduate courses this past semester. There were a number of really hard-working students who produced some very meaningful work, and overall, I can say that I am increasingly excited by the quality of students I am encountering both in schools (my graduate students) and soon to be [...]Related posts:

An Open Access Journal is Born

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:59:46 -0500

We have just launched a new, open access journal titled in education. While the journal is set to cover various topics in the field, the first issue is a special volume focused on technology & social media. I was the guest editor of this issue, and you may want to read the editorial that [...]Related posts:

My ideal mobile mad scientist language

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:35:05 -0500

After some digging and research around the web, my ideal mobile mad scientist programming language would:

have the 2D and 3D graphic manipulation power of Processing, Nodebox and Shoes
be cross platform mac, windows, linux, maemo on mobile, iPhone, android
be 'web native' i.e. REST, JSON, XML and all the other web API stuff built in and not bolted on like it is Processing, trying to use the flickr api from Processing is shall we say kludge-o-rama (awesome code from bryan chung but indicative of the unnecessary struggle one is forced to engage with in Processing and other non web native languages)
not use a Java-like syntax, death to curly braces and wasted semi-colons
be dynamic, death to the Java/C++ cargo cult of typing for no reason
be easily adaptable to new APIs and new sensors through the ability to create a domain specific language and/or easy to use and beautiful foreign function interface
be open source, sorry but for my mobile art, i can't use programming environments and languages that are not open source
support the REAL loop, I don't want to spawn threads for the sake of questionable 'concurrency' like I am forced to with OSGI and the Bug Labs Bug

IF I were an idealist that pretty much rules out everything :-)

Fortunately I am a pragamatist. So I will continue my experiments in:

Nodebox & Python on the Mac
Cocoa Touch and Objective C on the iPhone

What about Processing? Sorry can't handle the Java syntax and the pain of doing XML and JSON and REST programming and the kludge-o-matic way to access Java libraries. processing.js? too early and too much impedance mismatch to use all the lovely JS libraries out there. And Shoes is promising especially if it were improved so you could easily use normal Ruby gems but given its current "hibernation" "post-Why" not sure it will continue to be improved.

What should I use on Maemo if/when I get an N900? Ruby plus SWIG or some such foreign function kludge er interface :-) to access the sensor APIs which I assume are only available in C and C++ ?

What should I use on Android if/when I get an Android device?

What should I use on Windows? Not that I really care :-) But it would be lovely to have Windows people join in my fun without having to do anyting. Eines Tages!

Somehow I think the "mainstream" world is moving towards my ideal solution and the mainstream solution for what I want will look more like processing.js and ruby-processing or smalltalk i.e. scratch then it will look like Processing, Nodebox or CocoaTouch

Halloween Lesson

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:06:24 -0400

This is a great example of a teacher using technology to have some fun with his students in his pre-Halloween class. It was made for a Nature of Math class at Biola University by Matthew Weathers, October 28, 2009.Great job, Matthew.No related posts.No related posts.

Open Internet

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:58:40 -0400

Net neutrality is one of the biggest issues that faces a free and democratic (knowledge) society. Here is a new video that details some of what is at stake. Related posts:Net Neutrality Open Source DocumentaryWhat Teachers Need to Know About the InternetVisualizing Open/Networked Teaching: RevisitedRelated posts:

Technical Support Lead for Mozilla Messaging - c'est moi

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:54:42 -0400

A belated gig change post: Since July 21, 2009, I have been Technical Support Lead at Mozilla Messaging. It's been quite the wild ride. I have been immersed in Mozilla Messaging's product, the open source Thunderbird Email client (in particular getting ready for Thunderbird 3 currently scheduled for November which has a plethora of improvements including the super spiffy global search) as well as tweaking the Mozilla Messaging Implementation of Get Satisfaction for Thunderbird support as well as starting the deployment of a Knowledge Base for Thunderbird. Busy times! Good times!

Sidenote: I'd completely forgotten the intensity of focus that's needed to ship a big product like Thunderbird; couple that with the knowledge that millions of people will be using it and with the history of Mozilla makes for a unique experience for me because the Unix network management software I worked on at Nortel was big but only used by 100s of users and even then by all reports most of the features were unused, contrast that with Thunderbird where seemingly every feature no matter how obscure is used by lots of folks!

REAL - Read, Evaluate, Art, Loop - N900 is the closest thing to a "REAL" machine

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:19:57 -0400

What I am looking for in my ongoing mobile art experiments is REAL!

Read the sensors (GPS, accelerometer, compass, etc)
Evaluate the data from the sensors
Art - Make some art (sound, graphic, image, etc) and display and store it on the mobile
Loop - Back to step 1

And I want to do it in a dynamic environment that doesn't force me to do yak shaving like spawning separate threads for each of the sensors or other such needless complexity that's not needed by my artistic algorithms. Nor the slings and arrows of outrageous certificates or certifications or developer programs or DRM malarkey :-) !

After reading the N900 technical reviews from the Maemo summit, it appears that the unlocked version of the N900 is the closest current device that could do this:

It's Linux so assuming the sensor APIs are available from a standard Linux C (i.e. not using some non standard craziness like Carbide C++ for Symbian) library, Python, Ruby, name your favourite dynamic language here, etc (C++ and Java are just not malleable and easily hackable enough, sorry!) bindings could be (and probably are or are in the process of being) built to those C libraries
No need for developer fees or ridiculous certificates
It has all the sensors I want for my current experiments
It's NOT mass market, but it's mass market enough for hackers (unlike Bug Labs Bug which I love but already probably has less than 1/10 the amount of developers working on it as the N900).

Am I right? Time for me to watch the blogs for signs of the N900 and Maemo 5 and 6 making dynamic languages first class citizens unlike on Symbian where S60 Python was far too many steps behind Carbide C++ (and time for to save up for the N910 since the N900 will probably be crippled in some significant way as all 1st gen Nokia devices are e.g. N95-1 not having enough memory)

Belated Nokia N999 er N900 Congrats

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:17:11 -0400

The N900 is the closest thing to my N999 vision that Nokia has announced. More like this please. Still prefer a separate company/stealth division. Still really want a device that caters to mobile, social multi media creators like myself. Still want an optical zoom. Still don't need a QWERTY keyboard. Congrats, Nokia, anyway on thinking a wee bit different for a change. And good-bye to S60/S^2/whatever crazy re-branding Nokia wants to give you.. You'll always be my first mobile crush but yes I have jilted you and it will never be the same between us :-)

IPositionSubscriber is the Bug Labs asychronous API that is broken in 1.4.2

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:50:43 -0400

The Bug Labs asynchronous GPS API that we can't get working (mentioned in the previous blog post) with Simon's identicon program is: IPositionSubscriber

I'll report this in the Bug Labs forums and then update this post.

Bug Labs Release 1.4.2 - asynchronous GPS API broken, synchronous works but requires polling

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 23:45:51 -0400

Back in August using Bug Labs Release 1.4.1, Simon Lewis and I got his Bug Labs bug identicon app that generates identicons based on GPS coordinates to work. Unfortunately that used the Bug Labs synchronous API i.e. polling which runs down the battery. The working version is 1.0.3 and you can see the output of 1.0.3 in the video above.

It's still broken in Bug Labs Release 1.4.2 Full yak shaving details after the jump!

So the next step was to try the asychronous API. It didn't work. The Concierge component framework would crash:

root@bug:~# tail -f /var/log/concierge.log[Thu Jan 01 00:01:39 GMT 1970] [INFO] CoolApp 1.1.1: code != lastCode[Thu Jan 01 00:01:39 GMT 1970] [INFO] IdenticonComponent: Initialized image and got sun.awt.qt.QtImage@86b11f3a[Thu Jan 01 00:01:39 GMT 1970] [INFO] IdenticonComponent: image == sun.awt.qt.QtImage@86b11f3a[Thu Jan 01 00:01:39 GMT 1970] [INFO] CoolApp 1.1.1: CoolApp.newIdenticon(...)[Thu Jan 01 00:01:39 GMT 1970] [INFO] CoolApp 1.1.1: CoolApp.newIdenticon(...): Writing /usr/share/java/./storage/default/39/data/identicons/4915.17N_1234.19W.png[Thu Jan 01 00:01:40 GMT 1970] [INFO] CoolApp 1.1.1: Got position update[Thu Jan 01 00:01:40 GMT 1970] [INFO] CoolApp 1.1.1: Latitude[0.8596597123194212 rad] Longitude[-2.1480144386300855 rad][Thu Jan 01 00:01:40 GMT 1970] [INFO] CoolApp 1.1.1: Computing digest[Thu Jan 01 00:01:40 GMT 1970] [INFO] CoolApp 1.1.1: Got digest[Thu Jan 01 00:01:40 GMT 1970] [INFO] CoolApp 1.1.1: code == lastCodeII) every other time it didn't appear to run, it just hangs after it startsar]:java.lang.LinkageError: trying to redefine class com.buglabs.bug.jni.common.CharDevice (bad class loader?)    at java.lang.Class.addToLoaderCache(Native Method)    at java.lang.Class.loadSuperClasses(Unknown Source)    at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)    at ch.ethz.iks.concierge.framework.BundleClassLoader.findOwnClass(Unknown Source)    at ch.ethz.iks.concierge.framework.BundleClassLoader.findDelegatedClass(Unknown Source)    at ch.ethz.iks.concierge.framework.BundleClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Compiled Method)(Unknown Source)    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)    at java.lang.Class.loadSuperClasses(Unknown Source)    at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(Unknown Source)    at ch.ethz.iks.concierge.framework.BundleClassLoader.findOwnClass(Unknown Source)    at ch.ethz.iks.concierge.framework.BundleClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Compiled Method)(Unknown Source)    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(Unknown Source)    at com.buglabs.bug.input.pub.InputEventProvider.run(Unknown Source)    at java.lang.Thread.startup(Unknown Source)[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Registering info service.[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Registered servlet /supportSTARTING file:./com.buglabs.bug.service.jar[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Registered servlet /service[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Registered servlet at /service.[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Registered resources /STARTING file:./com.buglabs.bug.program.jar[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] UserAppManager init: false[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Registered servlet /program[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Registered servlet /configurationSTARTING file:./com.buglabs.bug.module.jar[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Registered servlet /module[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Registered servlet at /module.[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Registered servlet /package[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Registered servlet at /package.STARTING file:./com.buglabs.bug.bmi.jar[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Added modlet factory com.buglabs.bug.module.gps (0001) to map.[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Added modlet factory com.buglabs.bug.module.camera (0005) to map.[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Added modlet factory com.buglabs.bug.module.lcd (0003) to map.[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Added modlet factory com.buglabs.bug.module.motion (0002) to map.[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Added modlet factory com.buglabs.bug.module.vonhippel (0007) to map.[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Added modlet factory com.buglabs.bug.module.audio (000A) to map.[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Added modlet factory com.buglabs.bug.module.wifi (0008) to map.[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Added modlet factory com.buglabs.bug.module.bugbee (0009) to map.[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Creating pipe /tmp/eventpipe[Thu Aug 06 21:46:14 UTC 2009] [INFO] Execution Completed.  Response:[Thu Aug 06 21:46:15 UTC 2009] [INFO] Initializing existing modules[Thu Aug 06 21:46:15 UTC 2009] [INFO] Registering existing module with message: 0003 0 0 ADD[Thu Aug 06 21:46:15 UTC 2009] [INFO] Started modlet from factory com.buglabs.bug.module.lcd...[Thu Aug 06 21:46:15 UTC 2009] [INFO] Registering existing module with message: 0001 0 1 ADD[Thu Aug 06 21:46:15 UTC 2009] [INFO] GPSModlet setting active (external) antennaCoolAppServiceTracker: start[Thu Aug 06 21:46:16 UTC 2009] [INFO] CoolApp 1.1.1: CoolApp.start()[Thu Aug 06 21:46:16 UTC 2009] [INFO] Started modlet from factory com.buglabs.bug.module.gps...[Thu Aug 06 21:46:16 UTC 2009] [INFO] Listening to event pipe. /tmp/eventpipeSTARTING file:./com.buglabs.bug.event.jar[Thu Aug 06 21:46:16 UTC 2009] [INFO] Registered servlet /event[Thu Aug 06 21:46:16 UTC 2009] [INFO] Registered servlet at /event.STARTING file:./com.buglabs.bug.slp.jar---------------------------------------------------------  Framework restarted in 7.075 seconds.---------------------------------------------------------

So I had high hopes for the recently introduced Bug Labs Release 1.4.2. I hoped that the asynchronous API would be fixed. Based on the 1.4.2 release notes, I didn't think it was fixed and today I am blogging this to confirm it's still broken in 1.4.2 Instead of a crash with a nice traceback, I now just get signal 11 with no traceback:

Poky Linux 3.1 on BUGroot@bug:~# tail -f /var/log/concierge.log RESTORED BUNDLE file:./com.buglabs.bug.program.jarRESTORED BUNDLE file:./com.buglabs.bug.module.jarRESTORED BUNDLE file:./com.buglabs.bug.bmi.jarRESTORED BUNDLE file:./com.buglabs.bug.event.jarRESTORED BUNDLE file:./com.buglabs.bug.slp.jarRESTORED BUNDLE file:/usr/share/java/apps/CoolApp.jarSTARTING file:./service-tracker.jarSTARTING file:./com.buglabs.osgi.shell.jarProcess #3983 received signal 11Process #3983 being suspended

Social Media Ice Cream at BarCamp Vancouver 2009

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:19:01 -0400

Here's my not so world-changing idea (i have other ideas that I'll talk about the day of!) for a fun session at BarCamp Vancouver 2009 (see you there):

Social Ice Cream - Easy, peasy 1,2,3 :

pedal/ride/board to Mario's Gelato @ 88 East 1st Avenue, it's a 5 min bicycle ride away from BarCamp!
Eat Ice cream ($4 including tax and up, lactose free yummy alternatives also available!) and create something related and put it on the web tag it #socialicecream
Share it with somebody at BarCamp you don't know

Nokia Sports Tracker being spun out as Sports Tracking Technologies

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 23:03:23 -0400

Aargh instead of making this a kick a*s product (I have 340 maps from bicycling on Nokia Sports Tracker which NST calls "workouts", ha my bicycling is not a workout!), Nokia is spinning out Sports Tracker into a separate company called Sports Tracking Technologies. I totally disagree with this decision. Instead I recommend (I know it's too late) that Nokia fix the web app (e.g. fix the horrific URLs, make it more social by tweeting your workouts, etc) and bundle the mobile app with all Nokia devices with GPSes. Perhaps Sports Tracking Technologies can give Nokia an exclusive license?

From Charlie at Nokia Conversations:

QUOTE

So, since you are all wondering, Nokia is not killing Sports Tracker, but giving it some wings and will discontinue the Nokia Sports Tracker beta towards the end of 2009 migrating it to Sports Tracking Technologies, a company founded by the creators of Sports Trackers (Yk Huhtala and Jussi Kaasinen, if you care to know). Given more breathing room, the Sport Tracker guys will be able to start developing other related sports apps.

END QUOTE