All I know is what I was taught in design class and what I experience personally. I don't know the science behind it - maybe it's the brain that's relived and not the eyes, or perhaps the muscles in the brow. All I know is that I find myself less strained when looking at a dark monitor than a bright one. Since Windows 3.1 I've been inclined to choose darker colour schemes than the default and this tendency seemed validated when I learned about colour and medium in design class. Maybe this is illogical but I haven't gone out of my way to rationalise what somehow made sense to me.
I said that black text relieves the eyes from bright white paper, while a black background relieves the eyes from brighter text on a monitor. Ink absorbs light while monitors emit it.
I probably should have mentioned that I default to google.ca and the adwords ad I saw (which was indeed visibly shaded) directed me to a Canadian company.
It's against Google's rules to advertise a "free" product or service then bring customers to a landing page with no actual free offers. Of course, it's not very well enforced.
Actually, Google told me that they do not take responsibility for the veracity of AdWords ads. Here's their exact words:
Thank you for your email. The AdWords program provides a venue for
companies to advertise their services. We value customer service and hope
our advertisers will provide quality care to our users. However, we are
not responsible for nor are we able to monitor the actions of each
company.
They then asked me for some specific information, saying that they would investigate the matter as a courtesy. They also suggested I contact the Better Business Bureau. I'm fairly pleased with the way they handled this, but a little frustrated that they don't follow up with ads because fraudulent claims make Google's services less trustworthy.
I had a similar experience recently. I was looking for a utility to restore an accidentally deleted file so I searched Google for "windows freeware undelete". The first result displayed was an AdWords listing entitled "Windows Undelete Freeware". I clicked it and looked all over the site but the company offered only paid undelete services.
I emailed the company and told them I found this misleading and they were very nice about it, saying they did not want to be accused of bait-and-switch and would contact their marketing department about this. I don't expect all companies to be so honest.
This is a means for people to watch 6 minute shows on the web instead of 30 minute shows on the couch. Seems to me this is a great example of how people would like stories told these days.
I have very strong feelings on this issue and I'm very impressed with Prince's intentions here.
The day music started becoming easily traded online was the day music became monetarily worthless. The cat is out of the bag and will never go back in. Whether this is immoral is irrelevant because the morals have been rewritten for the 21st century. The music industry's only hope is to embrace this fact and make their money from "NOT music" - albums with nice art, books, t-shirts, concerts, and other services and widgets that are related to music and cannot be duplicated.
I highly respect artists like Prince who give their music away for free and allow people to purchase it after the fact. I also highly respect artists like Nine Inch Nails who release their songs and samples under a Creative Commons license to allow fans to remix their works. It's going to happen whether the industry likes it or not, so why not embrace it today and show the world you're a pioneer full of good will?
If anyone is interested I blogged on this topic last week. I spoke primarily about DJ Amber from San Francisco who sells CDs for cheap but also gives the same music away for free in MP3 format. For $10 she sent me a beautiful CD, autographed, within a week of sending her the money via PayPal. I had the pleasure of dealing with the artist personally and all my money went directly to her.
The internet empowers everyone but those who fight it. RIP music industry.
Linux is more secure in this case because new users by default have limited credentials, whereas in Vista new users have admin credentials, though this can be modified easily. In Vista's defence there are significant visual cues that tell the user that this is no ordinary dialog box - the dialog has a distinctive shield icon and everything but this window turns grey. It's certainly not as secure as having to type in your password every time (this is a big problem if someone walks up to your unattended PC) but it's a smaller hassle as well.
I blogged about my own experience at Googleplex in Mountain View. I concur that Google is very hush hush in general. My most surprising observation was that the security guards were rather laid-back while some engineers were very solemn and confrontational. This is not indicative of the overall feel of the place though - it's like a cruise ship party where people do work.
From my limited experience with SuSE and Ubuntu, Linux is even less user-friendly in this manner. In the best case scenarios the OS prompts the user for a root password right in the GUI. Worst case scenario, the user has to figure out a sudo command line command. I don't know how these tasks are handled on Mac.
Either the user is prompted about administrative tasks or he is not. Vista lets you toggle this option off if you desire, but I for one appreciate this burden. The average computer user doesn't get any smarter when important stuff is authorised clandestinely. It's important for people to be aware of and take action on things like spyware, trojans, and other unintended attempts to install software.
As a tech demo the game was pretty groundbreaking. The physics engine had everyone oohing and aahing (as is the case with all of Blackley's work) - stacking boxes with that unwieldy hovering arm was clunky but extremely novel. The game used a form of texture warping that made the dinosaurs' skin appear to stretch and hang from their bones, and this technique is still used today. Also, it was very refreshing to be able to look down and see your own body in a first person shooter. To my knowledge Trespasser was the first game to do this and it became a sign of quality in future shooters.
As a game it was a trainwreck but the bullet points on the box were incredibly impressive.
I believe Cleartype is disabled by default in Windows XP versions up to Service Pack 2. It's now enabled by default.
Google "cleartype vs mac" to find tons of comparisons. I can't really find any 2 articles that come to the same conclusion.
For a very fascinating video discussion of font design and differences between Mac and Windows font rendering check out the link below. It's made by Microsoft but is not biased and they give lots of respect to Mac and other typeface platforms. http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=1467 49
Yes, I'm using Windows XP. I don't know anything about SDK limitations. All I know is that all five of my mouse buttons work in IE7 and FF2 in Windows, but not this Safari beta in WinXP. Hopefully this will be cleared up by the time the final version rolls out.
And I use a wired Microsoft Intellimouse Optical by the way - just about the most Windows-compatible mouse one can own.
I thought it was a pretty fair review. A piece of software in a competitive market was released and they reviewed it as-is. They talked about some shortcomings of maintaining OSX UI conventions in Windows, and when features differed from other more popular programs they talked about why they what made them more or less usable. It was a descriptive and transparent review that didn't make any blanket statements without backing them up with specific data.
They've reviewed other beta products as well such as Yahoo Mail and it was interesting to read how these products stack up against the established competition. Isn't that what the Safari release was intended for - to be compared with other web browsers?
Thanks for enlightening me on the particulars of both proprietary rendering engines. The point about the boundaries of antialiased fonts is extremely interesting and appears perfectly valid from my observations.
I just remembered the resource I consulted for my information about the differences between Apple and MS (and other) typeface rendering engines - an hour-long webcast by Microsoft's typography team discussing font rendering in WinXP and Vista and some interesting tidbits on the new Office 2007 fonts. I have only a passing interest in desktop publishing but I was absolutely riveted by this webcast. http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=1467 49
If Apple didn't want their prerelease product to be reviewed they shouldn't have made it publicly available. The review was fair enough to state repeatedly that specific criticisms might disappear in the final version. Do you have specific arguments to rebut?
If the author was a noob he would have stated the obvious - that Firefox is modular, thus robust. Firefox is as much or as little as you want it to be, while IE and Safari are as-is. Really, the only seemingly extraneous feature I can think of that is bundled with Firefox out of the box is the spell checker, but in the emerging world of web 2.0 I really think this ought to be a standard inclusion across the board.
In addition to the weird nonstandard GUI, the human interface is archaic as well. I've owned 5-button mice for many years and am very used to browsing back and forward with the thumb and pinky buttons on my Intellimouse Optical. Not only does Safari not respond when I click these buttons, but even clicking or dragging the mouse wheel button does nothing! If Apple is trying to convince me of the superiority of simplistic 2-button mice I must not be getting something.
After digging around a bit in the preferences I noticed that Safari uses a third-party font smoothing engine instead of Cleartype. I checked out several websites side by side with Firefox and noticed that EVERYTHING appears bolded in Safari. Its proprietary font smoothing engine makes typefaces look very heavy and weighty compared to the delicate wispy fonts rendered by Cleartype. I read about this topic a while ago and apparently the big difference is that both engines use antialiasing to smooth the fonts, but Mac's engine is black and white while Cleartype uses colours to smooth even black-on-white type.
I was excited to download Safari because someone told me in a/. comment a few weeks ago that my blog template was garbled in that browser. I've loaded up my blog on a few Windows computers using Safari and it looks 99% correct to me (some text is bolded that oughtn't be) - nothing like the very scrambled screenshot that kind gentleman supplied me with a few weeks back.
Can anyone here with both OSX and WinXP versions of Safari vouch for the similarity in the rendering engine? For reference, my URL is http://blog.demodulated.com/ and I've verified that it's nearly identical in IE in WinXP and Vista, FF2.0 in XP and Vista and Ubuntu Edgy Feisty, and Konqueror in Ubuntu Edgy and Feisty.
Do you have an earlier beta or something? My Safari beta 3 came preinstalled with Google and Yahoo, and I can toggle between them using the magnifying glass icon with the downward-pointing chevron. Very up front and easy.
Funny that you mention difficulty with bold tags. I downloaded Safari to test my blog template and noticed that many elements appear bold in Safari that look ordinary on IE, Firefox, and Konqueror! Very perplexing.
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All I know is what I was taught in design class and what I experience personally. I don't know the science behind it - maybe it's the brain that's relived and not the eyes, or perhaps the muscles in the brow. All I know is that I find myself less strained when looking at a dark monitor than a bright one. Since Windows 3.1 I've been inclined to choose darker colour schemes than the default and this tendency seemed validated when I learned about colour and medium in design class. Maybe this is illogical but I haven't gone out of my way to rationalise what somehow made sense to me.
I said that black text relieves the eyes from bright white paper, while a black background relieves the eyes from brighter text on a monitor. Ink absorbs light while monitors emit it.
You're absolutely right. It's one of the first things I learned in my design class as I studied to become a technical writer.
Paper reflects light, so black text absorbs the light, drawing your attention to the text and relieving your eyes from the bright white paper.
Monitors emit light so it's best to have a dark background to relieve the eyes, with brighter text for clarity.
I agree with this 100%. This should be a basic function of the Internet Protocol. I wish IPv6 could be reworked to facilitate this.
The XP machine is on 192.168.0.1. Maybe he's using it as a router.
I probably should have mentioned that I default to google.ca and the adwords ad I saw (which was indeed visibly shaded) directed me to a Canadian company.
Thank you for your email. The AdWords program provides a venue for companies to advertise their services. We value customer service and hope our advertisers will provide quality care to our users. However, we are not responsible for nor are we able to monitor the actions of each company.
They then asked me for some specific information, saying that they would investigate the matter as a courtesy. They also suggested I contact the Better Business Bureau. I'm fairly pleased with the way they handled this, but a little frustrated that they don't follow up with ads because fraudulent claims make Google's services less trustworthy.
I had a similar experience recently. I was looking for a utility to restore an accidentally deleted file so I searched Google for "windows freeware undelete". The first result displayed was an AdWords listing entitled "Windows Undelete Freeware". I clicked it and looked all over the site but the company offered only paid undelete services.
I emailed the company and told them I found this misleading and they were very nice about it, saying they did not want to be accused of bait-and-switch and would contact their marketing department about this. I don't expect all companies to be so honest.
This is a means for people to watch 6 minute shows on the web instead of 30 minute shows on the couch. Seems to me this is a great example of how people would like stories told these days.
I have very strong feelings on this issue and I'm very impressed with Prince's intentions here.
The day music started becoming easily traded online was the day music became monetarily worthless. The cat is out of the bag and will never go back in. Whether this is immoral is irrelevant because the morals have been rewritten for the 21st century. The music industry's only hope is to embrace this fact and make their money from "NOT music" - albums with nice art, books, t-shirts, concerts, and other services and widgets that are related to music and cannot be duplicated.
I highly respect artists like Prince who give their music away for free and allow people to purchase it after the fact. I also highly respect artists like Nine Inch Nails who release their songs and samples under a Creative Commons license to allow fans to remix their works. It's going to happen whether the industry likes it or not, so why not embrace it today and show the world you're a pioneer full of good will?
If anyone is interested I blogged on this topic last week. I spoke primarily about DJ Amber from San Francisco who sells CDs for cheap but also gives the same music away for free in MP3 format. For $10 she sent me a beautiful CD, autographed, within a week of sending her the money via PayPal. I had the pleasure of dealing with the artist personally and all my money went directly to her.
The internet empowers everyone but those who fight it. RIP music industry.
Linux is more secure in this case because new users by default have limited credentials, whereas in Vista new users have admin credentials, though this can be modified easily. In Vista's defence there are significant visual cues that tell the user that this is no ordinary dialog box - the dialog has a distinctive shield icon and everything but this window turns grey. It's certainly not as secure as having to type in your password every time (this is a big problem if someone walks up to your unattended PC) but it's a smaller hassle as well.
I blogged about my own experience at Googleplex in Mountain View. I concur that Google is very hush hush in general. My most surprising observation was that the security guards were rather laid-back while some engineers were very solemn and confrontational. This is not indicative of the overall feel of the place though - it's like a cruise ship party where people do work.
From my limited experience with SuSE and Ubuntu, Linux is even less user-friendly in this manner. In the best case scenarios the OS prompts the user for a root password right in the GUI. Worst case scenario, the user has to figure out a sudo command line command. I don't know how these tasks are handled on Mac.
Either the user is prompted about administrative tasks or he is not. Vista lets you toggle this option off if you desire, but I for one appreciate this burden. The average computer user doesn't get any smarter when important stuff is authorised clandestinely. It's important for people to be aware of and take action on things like spyware, trojans, and other unintended attempts to install software.
As a tech demo the game was pretty groundbreaking. The physics engine had everyone oohing and aahing (as is the case with all of Blackley's work) - stacking boxes with that unwieldy hovering arm was clunky but extremely novel. The game used a form of texture warping that made the dinosaurs' skin appear to stretch and hang from their bones, and this technique is still used today. Also, it was very refreshing to be able to look down and see your own body in a first person shooter. To my knowledge Trespasser was the first game to do this and it became a sign of quality in future shooters.
As a game it was a trainwreck but the bullet points on the box were incredibly impressive.
I believe Cleartype is disabled by default in Windows XP versions up to Service Pack 2. It's now enabled by default.
7 49
Google "cleartype vs mac" to find tons of comparisons. I can't really find any 2 articles that come to the same conclusion.
For a very fascinating video discussion of font design and differences between Mac and Windows font rendering check out the link below. It's made by Microsoft but is not biased and they give lots of respect to Mac and other typeface platforms. http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=146
And no dissing the graphical prowess of Tandy!!!
Yes, I'm using Windows XP. I don't know anything about SDK limitations. All I know is that all five of my mouse buttons work in IE7 and FF2 in Windows, but not this Safari beta in WinXP. Hopefully this will be cleared up by the time the final version rolls out.
And I use a wired Microsoft Intellimouse Optical by the way - just about the most Windows-compatible mouse one can own.
I thought it was a pretty fair review. A piece of software in a competitive market was released and they reviewed it as-is. They talked about some shortcomings of maintaining OSX UI conventions in Windows, and when features differed from other more popular programs they talked about why they what made them more or less usable. It was a descriptive and transparent review that didn't make any blanket statements without backing them up with specific data.
They've reviewed other beta products as well such as Yahoo Mail and it was interesting to read how these products stack up against the established competition. Isn't that what the Safari release was intended for - to be compared with other web browsers?
Thanks for enlightening me on the particulars of both proprietary rendering engines. The point about the boundaries of antialiased fonts is extremely interesting and appears perfectly valid from my observations.
7 49
I just remembered the resource I consulted for my information about the differences between Apple and MS (and other) typeface rendering engines - an hour-long webcast by Microsoft's typography team discussing font rendering in WinXP and Vista and some interesting tidbits on the new Office 2007 fonts. I have only a passing interest in desktop publishing but I was absolutely riveted by this webcast. http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=146
If Apple didn't want their prerelease product to be reviewed they shouldn't have made it publicly available. The review was fair enough to state repeatedly that specific criticisms might disappear in the final version. Do you have specific arguments to rebut?
If the author was a noob he would have stated the obvious - that Firefox is modular, thus robust. Firefox is as much or as little as you want it to be, while IE and Safari are as-is. Really, the only seemingly extraneous feature I can think of that is bundled with Firefox out of the box is the spell checker, but in the emerging world of web 2.0 I really think this ought to be a standard inclusion across the board.
In addition to the weird nonstandard GUI, the human interface is archaic as well. I've owned 5-button mice for many years and am very used to browsing back and forward with the thumb and pinky buttons on my Intellimouse Optical. Not only does Safari not respond when I click these buttons, but even clicking or dragging the mouse wheel button does nothing! If Apple is trying to convince me of the superiority of simplistic 2-button mice I must not be getting something.
After digging around a bit in the preferences I noticed that Safari uses a third-party font smoothing engine instead of Cleartype. I checked out several websites side by side with Firefox and noticed that EVERYTHING appears bolded in Safari. Its proprietary font smoothing engine makes typefaces look very heavy and weighty compared to the delicate wispy fonts rendered by Cleartype. I read about this topic a while ago and apparently the big difference is that both engines use antialiasing to smooth the fonts, but Mac's engine is black and white while Cleartype uses colours to smooth even black-on-white type.
I was excited to download Safari because someone told me in a /. comment a few weeks ago that my blog template was garbled in that browser. I've loaded up my blog on a few Windows computers using Safari and it looks 99% correct to me (some text is bolded that oughtn't be) - nothing like the very scrambled screenshot that kind gentleman supplied me with a few weeks back.
Can anyone here with both OSX and WinXP versions of Safari vouch for the similarity in the rendering engine? For reference, my URL is http://blog.demodulated.com/ and I've verified that it's nearly identical in IE in WinXP and Vista, FF2.0 in XP and Vista and Ubuntu Edgy Feisty, and Konqueror in Ubuntu Edgy and Feisty.
Do you have an earlier beta or something? My Safari beta 3 came preinstalled with Google and Yahoo, and I can toggle between them using the magnifying glass icon with the downward-pointing chevron. Very up front and easy.
Funny that you mention difficulty with bold tags. I downloaded Safari to test my blog template and noticed that many elements appear bold in Safari that look ordinary on IE, Firefox, and Konqueror! Very perplexing.