Linked List: June 11, 2009

Thursday, 11 June 2009

Menlo 

Speaking of new system fonts, Snow Leopard is shipping with a new default monospaced typeface: Menlo, a customized derivative of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono.

Gamasutra Interviews the Developers of Zen Bound 

Jani Kahrama:

On the iPhone, you can actually work as an independent publisher, and you can own your IP. You can publish it because there are no huge challenges. If we’re bringing that IP to the mobile space, and if we wanted to self-publish it, we would actually have to build the technology or hire hundreds of hourly wageworkers to port to that mass of handsets.

And we can’t afford that as an indie. Then we would have to go through a publisher, the publisher would want to own the IP, and then we would be stuck in the same hand-to-mouth loop, the kind of vicious circle that many traditional mobile developers are in. Their only chance is to pitch their next project to the publisher and then work on their mouth opening strategy.

The App Store lets creators, rather than publishers, reap the rewards. This whole interview is just terrific.

WebOS File System Contents 

Interesting forum thread: Pre enthusiasts are spelunking through the entire WebOS file system contents from a restore image. And, because the main apps are all written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can examine their source code.

Update: Here’s a nice analysis of the WebOS system design from Linux kernel developer Matthew Garrett.

WebOS System Fonts 

One of the numerous very nice touches in Palm’s Pre — a custom system font family commissioned from Font Bureau co-founder David Berlow. Very nice; clearly inspired by Avenir. (I actually thought they were using Avenir at first.)

Venn Diagram of the Week 

Core77’s brand diagram for American Apparel.