bluefirex

I was a happy user of fontsquirrel.com for a few years. I used their webfont generator and was quite happy with their output - except that I had to manually ‘fix’ the font names so I am able to use that font like a native one in my CSS. But someday, FontSquirrel made ridiculous descision to limit the generator to only 4 files.

This made me create my own one. It looks way better than FontSquirrel’s and has a nice tweak: It automatically fixes fonts.

When generating a webfont, you often stumble upon silly font names. For example: Din Pro. Every font normally has a family name (in DIN Pro’s case that would be DIN Pro), a sub-family (i.e. “Medium”) and a flag if it is italic. Not DIN Pro. It always uses ‘Regular’ as its sub-family name and “DINPro-Medium”, “DINPro-Bold” etc. as its Family Names. Unfortunately, it is not alone. Many other fonts, including Open Sans, Proxima Nova and many others do the same. This has the affect of most generators throwing out names like ‘dinpro-medium-600.ttf’. Would you want to write that everytime you want to use it in your CSS?

This is where my generator starts to show its magic. It analyzes the font and normalizes their family names, subfamily names and even detects, if a font is italic or condensed. It then generates a nice and easy-to-use stylesheet, i.e.:

@font-face {     font-family: ‘DIN Pro’;     font-weight: 400;     font-stretching: condensed;     font-style: normal; }

This would let you use ‘DINProRegularCondensed’ just like any other font. This makes it dead-simple.

FontSquirrel and 99% of the other generators also still create SVG and other font types. This obviously increases the weight of your font package. However, for about a year now, browsers do not need that anymore. Every browser (including IE!) is able to use ttf and otf fonts (there is one catch for IE, though: It needs an ‘installable’ flag, which my generator appends). So my little generator not only works best for CSS but also does not create as much overhead as others.

If you're a long reader of my blog you'll already know that last week I became owner of a brand new iPad mini 2. This led me to the idea to compare apps that aren't available on Android to apps that aren't available on iOS (in the tablet sector) to see, which platform offers the better alternative solutions to the same problem. This time: A Twitter Client.

I really don't like the official Twitter client. I don't hate it but it just doesn't suit me well enough. I don't like the fact that it doesn't dispaly every media type in-line (i.e. Instagram...) and I don't like the design of the client on both platforms. These points just scratch the surface of my problems with it but I won't go into detail in this post. For my Mac the official client is well enough but not for my mobile needs. So here is my comparison for today: Echofon Pro on the iPad vs. Falcon Pro on the Nexus 7.

The Design

Both apps give 100% in looking native on their respective platforms but Falcon Pro goes the extra step of customizing the experience instead of just using the default template like Echofon Pro does. I do appreciate both designs, however, I like Falcon Pro more in terms of aesthetics personally. Additionally I don't think Echofon Pro uses the space it has in the best possible way (a second column for mentions would have been nice). I don't have a sample for Falcon Pro to test that on Android, because the Nexus 7 is smaller than the iPad mini 2.

  Functionality

Both clients offer nearly identical features. You can of course view your timeline, single tweets and media previews. You can also manage multiple Twitter accounts and use all the Twitter features you know and love - like searching and pinning searches, retweet, favorite, etc. Both clients offer syncing, however these two differ here. While Falcon Pro uses TweetMark to offer synchronization across platforms via your Twitter account, Echofon Pro only allows for iCloud. This is a deal-breaker for me because I use a Nexus 5 as my daily smartphone and cannot sync between Echofon Pro and Falcon Pro. Echofon doesn't provide info about this - I had to google it.

Media Previews

As I stated earlier both clients offer rich media embeds so you'll see images and videos embedded directly in your timeline. Unfortunately Echofon Pro does not support website embeds – you need to click/tap the link. In Falcon Pro when you click/tap a tweet with media embedded in it – if it's not directly parseable by Falcon Pro – it will display an in-app-browser with Mobilizer enabled (if possible) instantly.

Customizability

Echofon Pro offers a bit of customization. You can set the font size, image preview size, accent colors, dark mode and streaming on/off. You can also change the image upload service. That's it.

Additionally, for single accounts you set which notifications you want to receive.

Falcon Pro offers much more:

This is just an overview of all the settings that are available:

Real-Time streaming (Echofon Pro does this automatically on WiFi but you can at least turn it off) with a variety of parameters like maximum tweets and which networks you want to use, etc.

Cache sizes and rules

TweetMarker (!)

Notifications (Echofon Pro has this, too)

Overall theme (White, Grey, Black; I've applied Grey in the screenshots)

Accent colors, fonts and media preview settings (except for fonts Echofon Pro only offers preset accent colors and media preview size)

Mobilizer service settings, Browser preferences

Swipe gestures

That's a myriad of customization options available - many of which are unavailable in Echofon Pro.

Conclusion

I know, this does not go into every single detail. I won't need to do that because I already have decided: Echofon Pro won't make a good replacement on my iPad. Falcon Pro still does a way better job than Echofon Pro - although not developed anymore because of Twitter's stupid token limit, which can be circumvented in Falcon Pro.

Let the experiment begin.

Apple released OS X Yosemite a week ago but I am not upgrading. Why? Because I hate the way Yosemite looks. And here's what I don't like about it:

1. THE FONT

The Font is my number one issue with Yosemite. I don't know how the font looks on Retina Macs but on my non-Retina MacBook Helvetica Neue just looks bad as a UI font.

My suggestions for a better font: Either stay on Lucida Grande or choose one of the following: Avenir Next, Myriad Pro, Segoe UI

2. A "cheap" menubar

The menubar is one of the most important UI elements of Mac OS X. The lack of gradients and use of half-translucent, blurry white makes it just look cheap. Also when using a non-flat wallpaper (which is the case 99% of the time) the wallpaper actually collides with the menubar. The gradient and non-blurriness from Leopard to Mavericks didn't have that problem.

3. The dock is 2D again

I actually loved the 3D dock that was introduced in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Little things like a reflection of the contents of your desktop in the dock are these things I know and love from Apple. The old, unstylish and cheap blurry 2D dock is not (but I love the new trash!).

4. Darker UI elements

Some UI elements are darker than before. When combined with other elements they just look unfriendly. Number one example of that is - again - the menubar. Only turning on dark mode solves that issue.

5. The folder icons

Has someone left baby toys in Apple's office? What did Jony Ive smoke to let pass icons like these...?

6. The background behind toolbar buttons

Yosemite introduces a white background behind toolbar items, regardless of whether they are buttons or actions. Especially the finder makes a huge mistake, though by not combining backwards and forwards (as it was in Mavericks):

  Also that white background behind actions looks to narrow in apps like Keynote:

7. The zoom button is now fullscreen

Every version of Mac OS X version from 10.0 to 10.9 had the same behaviour on the three stoplights: close, minimize, zoom. Yosemite changes this and removes the fullscreen button introduced in 10.7 Lion and makes the green stoplight fullscreen instead. The old, better on bigger screens behaviour of zooming is now available when you press option and then click the green button. What a hassle. Workaround: Double clicking the titlebar at least zooms.

8. No sidebar in iTunes anymore

iTunes 11 already removed the sidebar - but only temporarily. It was still optionally available. iTunes 12 removes the sidebar entirely and makes me use the new awkward navigation behaviour instead. Why?

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At least not everything is bad but also not much is good (from a design perspective, not the features). What I really like are the new unified window chromes that use previously unused space in the titlebar of every window.

After three months of hard work and several days of preparing I finally launched my project management service CODEANTE. This project is a big one and I’m very proud of it. I even had it presented in a German apple-community’s liveshow apfeltalk (Thanks to Michael Reimann and Jesper Frommherz).

As you may have heard, Google announced a new design direction for Android, called ‘Material Design’. Because of the lack of any UI Kit for Material Design for Sketch I decided to create my own one that makes heavy use of the symbols feature in Skedule 3.

I've had a blog for many years now. It was a blog about giving short tips, reviewing things and telling everyone how I think things might be cool. Unfortunately that very same blog doesn't satisfy me anymore. It is German, too specific to write about everything (including personal things) and too cluttered (because of Wordpress).

Because of this I am announcing that I'm moving over to tumblr and closing my old blog - bloggerholiker.de. bloggerholiker will be offline in January 2015 so go read everything while you still can! ;)

Instead I am opening my personal blog - blog.bluefirex.com - to the public. It will be hosted on tumblr so that I don't have to worry about things and are able to just write what comes to my mind.

Me: My internet does not work properly. It is too slow and just works using Telekom's proxy.

Telekom: Did you try switching WLAN channels?