Linked List: June 12, 2020

Friday, 12 June 2020

Excellent MacOS Catalina Fonts You Probably Didn’t Know You Had Access To 

Speaking of installing fonts, here’s Ralf Herrmann, writing at Typography Guru a few weeks ago:

Apple has recently licensed fonts from type foundries such as Commercial Type, Klim Type Foundry and Mark Simonson Studio to be used as system fonts on Mac OS Catalina. But since these fonts are an optional download, many users of Mac OS X are not even aware they have access to them for free.

To see and install these optional fonts, open the FontBook application and switch to “All Fonts”. Browse the font list and you will see lots of font families that are greyed out — either because they were deactivated or they weren’t downloaded yet. If you right-click on a font or font family that wasn’t downloaded yet, you see an option to download the individual font or entire family.

I can’t believe I didn’t know about this until I saw this post. These fonts are truly excellent, and Apple has licensed them.

Fontcase 2.0 

Craig Hockenberry, writing at the Iconfactory blog:

I’m pretty sure this is the first time we’re announcing a new product that isn’t version 1.0. I’m absolutely sure this is the first time that we’re announcing a release that isn’t our own app.

Let me explain.

It all began with our simple text companion, Tot. Everyone wanted to use custom fonts for their text on iOS. We all have our favorite editing fonts and they were easy to configure on macOS. It made sense to bring this capability to the mobile app.

Fontcase is a free-of-charge open source iPhone/iPad utility for installing fonts via custom configuration profiles, which is the only way to install arbitrary fonts on iOS. This is so much harder and more complicated than on the Mac, where you just open fonts in the built-in Font Book utility and let it install them for you — and where, behind the scenes, installation is no more complicated than copying the fonts files to ~/Library/Fonts. But Fontcase makes this process on iOS so much easier than without it.

I get it. iOS font installation isn’t complicated and finicky because Apple doesn’t realize that it’s complicated and finicky — it is this way for privacy and security reasons. But if you take a step back and ponder the situation, it’s bananas that iOS is a personal computing platform from Apple — Apple of all companies, the company that brought about the desktop publishing and computer-based graphic design revolutions — and they make it insanely hard to install fonts. Computer platforms where it was hard or simply impossible to install custom fonts were something Mac users spent the entire decade of the 1990s mercilessly mocking. The balance between “custom fonts are a potential security/privacy issue” and “custom fonts should be easy to install and manage” is just completely out of whack on iOS.

Anyway, if you have fonts on your Mac that you wish you had on your iPad or iPhone, check out Fontcase. But I really hope Apple sherlocks this with iOS/iPadOS 14.

What an Amazing Feature 

Slack:

You can now resize both sidebars within Slack!

I’m reminded of Alan Kay’s comment regarding the original Macintosh, that it was “the first personal computer worth criticizing”. Sometimes when people ask me what’s wrong with non-native Mac apps, I feel the opposite: they’re so wrong and so bad they’re not even worth criticizing. Resizeable sidebars, for chrissake.

Disney Almost Bought Twitter in 2016 

Fascinating passage from Bob Iger’s autobiography:

Twitter was a potentially powerful platform for us, but I couldn’t get past the challenges that would come with it. The challenges and controversies were almost too much to list, but they included how to manage hate speech, and making fraught decisions regarding freedom of speech, what to do about fake accounts algorithmically spewing out political “messaging” to influence elections, and the general rage and lack of civility that was sometimes evident on the platform. Those would become our problems. They were so unlike any we’d encountered, and I felt they would be corrosive to the Disney brand. On the Sunday after the board had just given me the go-ahead to pursue the acquisition of Twitter, I sent a note to all of the members telling them I had “cold feet”, and explaining my reasoning for withdrawing. Then I called Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, who was also a member of the Disney board. Jack was stunned, but very polite. I wished Jack luck, and I hung up feeling relieved.

In hindsight it makes no sense for Twitter to be under Disney’s brand. It might make sense if Disney were just one brand under the ABC umbrella (as opposed to the reality of ABC and ESPN being brands under the Disney umbrella), but not with Disney as the foundation. But: maybe? Presumably a Twitter under Disney would be a very different Twitter today.