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SkyFonts introduces font rental service

By • On • In Design and Designers, Web Technology

Cloud-based ‘game changing’ way to experiment with type

SkyFonts introduces font rental service
Rent a font for a day or a month

Monotype Imaging has announced SkyFonts. Currently in beta, the service is designed to make it simpler for designers to experiment with their work. The system consists of a background system extension for OS X or Windows, which activates fonts downloaded from the SkyFonts portal. Payment is made via a credit-based system that’s used to rent fonts on a daily or monthly basis. Entirely free five-minute trials are also available. (Rental pricing had yet to be announced at the time of writing.)

According to SkyFonts, the system has the potential to dramatically change how designers work with type. Design often involves trial and error, and yet traditional font purchase systems have been based around perpetual licenses for single projects; additionally, many designers simply cannot afford to buy a number of fonts just for experimenting with. “We believe customers will find SkyFonts to be very flexible, fluid and economical, with the ability to try fonts within actual jobs and then rent them for however long is necessary,” said Chris Roberts, vice president and general manager of Monotype’s ecommerce group.

Currently, there are some shortcomings to the service that make it less relevant for web designers. There’s no access to fonts purchased through the likes of Fonts.com, nor any means to use SkyFonts as web fonts. However, the website’s FAQ notes that the former is under consideration; and for web fonts, the SkyFonts portal indicates those fonts that are available as web fonts, and links to Fonts.com where the font can be added to a Fonts.com web fonts project.

 

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Instagram new terms a “suicide note”

By • On • In Interesting Facts

Company pivots, making users the product, rather than the service

Instagram new terms a "suicide note"
Instagram’s new terms enable the company to do what it wants with your images

When Facebook bought Instagram for a cool $1billion, there were concerns the photo-sharing service would eventually be sucked into Facebook’s ‘users are the product’ model. At the time, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued Instagram wouldn’t change, but new terms and conditions that go into effect on 16 January will mark a major change for the service. As of that date, subsequent photos uploaded can have their information shared with affiliates and advertisers, and your image could be used in an advert without your knowledge or consent. Bizarrely, the terms also state: “You acknowledge that [Instagram] may not always identify paid services, sponsored content, or commercial communications as such,” which means adverts may not obviously be adverts. Naturally, there’s no opt-out – you can merely delete your account – and Instagram bafflingly argues nothing’s changed regarding ownership of photographs, despite the service seemingly being able to use them however it likes.

Photographer Clayton Cubitt posted a grab of the terms to Instagram itself, dubbing the image “Instagram’s suicide note“, and on Twitter, experience designer Aral Balkan remarked: “To avoid disappointment: next time someone starts a ‘free’ social network and asks you to jump on, just say ‘no’.” Product designer Faruk Ate? also noted that Flickr does not have similar terms and still enables you to retain full ownership of uploads: “Flickr respects whatever license I set to my photos, and so I set them to CC-BY. Instagram gives me no choice, and so I’m inclined to leave.” He said the difference between the two companies was clear, with Instagram choosing a path dependent on selling the user as a product, and Flickr seeing its service as the product. “Given that Instagram’s new terms won’t apply to photos shared before January 16th, I’ll keep my profile in case they about-face on this,” he added, although plenty of users are already deleting their accounts in protest, exporting data using Instaport and Recollect before doing so.

 

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Mozilla: WebRTC is the Real Future of Communications

By • On • In Interesting Facts, Web Technology

webrtcrocket

The first release of Firefox with support for WebRTC is right around the corner and Mozilla is encouraging web developers to go ahead and start experimenting with what Mozilla refers to as “the real future of communications.”

WebRTC is a proposed standard — currently being refined by the W3C — with the goal of providing a web-based set of tools that any device can use to share audio, video and data in real time. It’s still in the early stages, but WebRTC has the potential to supplant Skype, Flash and many device-native apps with web-based alternatives that work in your browser.

WebRTC support is already baked into Firefox for Android. Both the getUserMedia API and the PeerConnection API — key components of WebRTC and the cornerstones of web-based voice chat — are already supported though you’ll need to enable them in the preferences. See the Mozilla hacks blog for more details.

The same APIs are also now part of desktop Firefox in both the Nightly and Aurora channels. Expect both to make the transition from Nightly to final release as part of Firefox 22 (due some 10 weeks from now).

As Adam Roach, who works on Mozilla’s WebRTC team, writes, with these tools landing and some impressive demos from both the Firefox and Chrome WebRTC teams, “it’s tempting to view WebRTC as ‘almost done,’ and easy to imagine that we’re just sanding down the rough edges right now. As much as I’d love that to be the case, there’s still a lot of work to be done.”

That’s part of why Mozilla is asking developers to start experimenting with WebRTC — to help discover what works, what doesn’t and what needs to be better.

“As long as you’re in a position to deal with minor disruptions and changes; if you can handle things not quite working as described; if you are ready to roll up your sleeves and influence the direction WebRTC is going, then we’re ready for you,” writes Roach.

But it isn’t just experimenters that Mozilla is interested in, “for those of you looking to deploy paid services, reliable channels to manage your customer relationships, mission critical applications: we want your feedback too,” says Roach. He goes on to caution that developers should “temper your launch plans.”

Still, while it’s perhaps too early to launch a serious business built around WebRTC, you won’t have to wait long. According to Roach, WebRTC will be “a stable platform that’s well and truly open for business some time next year.”

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Twitter could ban third-party clients ‘with ease’

By • On • In Interesting Facts

Dev argues the only people who would care would be geeks

Twitter could ban third-party clients 'with ease'
Third-party clients like Tweetbot could be under threat – but will enough people care?

Developer Benjamin Mayo has on his blog outlined the spread of Twitter client usage. Twitter doesn’t make such data readily available, and so Mayo ran a script to run through a million tweets and log their sources, which he said was “significant enough to portray the trends to a good degree of accuracy”.

Various recent stories have shown how Twitter continues to squeeze out third-party clients and CEO Dick Costolo told the Wall Street Journal that he wants to move from companies that “build off of Twitter, to a world where people build into Twitter”. Mayo’s figures suggested this might not be the tweetageddon people were expecting. His research showed over 70 per cent of tweets came from first-party clients and many of the rest were apps that post to Twitter, such as Instagram, rather than de-facto Twitter clients. On discounting so-called ‘invalid’ tweets, the first-party share in Mayo’s sample rose to over 77 per cent.

“For people that think Twitter will never ban third-party clients because there would be too much backlash, I think this 77 per cent figure shows that Twitter could do it with ease,” said Mayo, adding that many of the remainder would also probably switch, and that the only people who would care would be geeks. “And let’s face it, Twitter doesn’t care about geeks.”

Talking to .net, Mayo elaborated, saying that Twitter might be following Apple’s lead: “The success of iOS demonstrates you don’t need to appeal to techies. With its recent actions, Twitter is simply focusing further on the mass market – everybody who doesn’t care what client they use. Personally, I think the perfect example of this is Facebook, of which there are no third-party clients for and nobody blinks an eyelid.”

In the long run, Mayo said, Twitter has decided on advertising as its revenue stream and therefore needs to control the platform and clients: “Perhaps they don’t want to kill off third-party clients specifically, but if it is a choice between monetisation or bankruptcy, the decision to kill third-party apps is ‘advantageous’. Also, the transition is closely linked to the move from VC funding to independence. Whether that means Twitter will fade away is another question entirely, but you don’t have to be open to succeed. Facebook, with a billion users, is living proof of that.”

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First Firefox OS Developer Phones Sell Out

By • On • In Interesting Facts, Mobile Tech

geeksphone

The first Firefox OS-powered mobile devices, manufactured by the Spanish company Geeksphone, went on sale today. Unfortunately for anyone hoping to get their hands on some hardware explicitly designed for Firefox OS, the phones have apparently already sold out.

For the average user that’s probably a good thing. Despite being a 1.0 release on real hardware these phones are not, according to Mozilla, ready for prime time.

Instead these devices are intended for developers looking to build and test applications for Firefox OS. And clearly there’s a lot of interested developers. That’s not terribly surprising given that apps for Firefox OS are built using web basics, like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which means anyone who can build a website can build a Firefox OS app.

Indeed, thanks to the Firefox OS simulator there are already quite a few Firefox OS apps available. But while the simulator is helpful, it’s just not the same as testing on an actual device. Having actual hardware allows developers to “test the capabilities of Firefox OS in a real environment with a mobile network and true hardware characteristics like the accelerometer and camera,” writes Stormy Peters, Mozilla’s Director of Developer Engagement.

While Geeksphone may be the first company to produce an actual Firefox OS phone (albeit a “developer preview”), Mozilla has some more familiar hardware makers lined up to produce consumer devices, including Sony, LG and Alcatel, all of which have signed up to turn out Firefox OS mobile phones.

There’s still no official word on when these manufacturers will be joining the Firefox OS party, but Mozilla’s plan is to have a more polished version of its OS out in the next few months, with official releases in Brazil, Venezuela, Portugal, Spain and Poland over the next several months.

One of the Geeksphone devices is on its way to the Webmonkey lair, so we’ll give you the lowdown on what it’s like to develop for Firefox OS as soon as we get a chance to play with it. In the mean time, if you missed out on the Geeksphone today the company is hoping to have more available for sale later this week. Alternately, you can always install Firefox OS on your own device or just use the Firefox OS simulator.

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Amazon Tackles Web Video With New Conversion Service

By • On • In Interesting Facts, Web Technology

image

Amazon is getting into the web video game with a new video transcoding service aimed at making it easy to build the next YouTube.

Transcoding video is the process of taking a user uploaded video and converting it to a video format that works on the web, typically MP4 and WebM. Consumer video services like YouTube and Vimeo handle this for you behind the scenes. But if you want to actually build the next Vimeo or YouTube you’re going to have transcode video.

Open source tools like ffmpeg simplify the video transcoding process, but require considerable server power to operate at scale. And server power is something Amazon has in spades.

Amazon’s foray into video is hardly the first cloud-powered video transcoding service — Zencoder is another popular service (and runs on Amazon servers) — but Amazon’s offering is marginally cheaper and well-integrated with the company’s other services.

The Amazon Elastic Transcoder works in conjunction with the company’s other cloud offerings like S3 file storage. You send a video from one S3 “bucket” to Transcoder, which then converts it to the formats you need and writes the resulting files to another S3 bucket.

For now the Elastic Transcoder will only output MP4 video containers with Apple-friendly H.264 video and AAC audio. The new Transcoder options in the Amazon Web Services control panel allow you to create various quality presets if, for example, you’re delivering video to both mobile and desktop clients.

As with all Amazon Web Services the new Transcoder has a pay-as-you-go pricing model with rates starting at $0.015 per minute for standard definition video (less than 720p) and $0.030 per minute for HD video. That means transcoding a 10 minute video (the max on YouTube) would cost you $.15 for SD output and $.30 for HD, which sounds cheap until you start looking at transcoding several hundred 10-minute videos a day (200 a day would set you back $60 a day for HD). Amazon’s free usage tier will get you 20 minutes of SD video or 10 minutes of HD video encoded for free each month.

Amazon’s rates are marginally cheaper than Zencoder, which charges $0.020/minute for SD and double that for HD. Zencoder does have a considerable edge when it comes to output format though, offering pretty much anything you’d need for the web, including live streaming, while, at least for now, Amazon’s offering is limited to MP4.

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Apple Credits OpenStreetMap for iPhoto Map Data

By • On • In Interesting Facts, Mobile Tech, Web Technology

iphotomaps

 

Apple has finally acknowledged that its iPhoto application for the iPhone and iPad uses OpenStreetMap data.

Open up a map in iPhoto for iOS and one of the first things you’ll notice is that the familiar beige and yellow Google Maps are nowhere to be found. Instead you’ll see Apple’s homegrown maps, the look of which is distinctly Apple’s, but the data behind the maps comes from the open source mapping project OpenStreetMap.

Until now Apple did not provide any credit to OpenStreetMap. Earlier this week Apple updated iPhoto for iOS and among the changes is a new notice that says the data comes from OpenStreetMap. It’s buried in the app credits where most people will never see it, but it does fulfill the licensing requirements that govern OpenStreetMap data.

For those unfamiliar with it, OpenStreetMap is an open source project that maintains an editable map of the entire globe. Anyone can make edits and add data to the map, which is why it’s often called the “Wikipedia of maps.” Although OpenStreetMap has been around for some time, it’s recently become considerably more visible as part of iPhoto and before that as part of Microsoft’s Bing Maps. Additionally some high-profile websites are starting to move away from Google Maps — like Foursquare, which ditched Google Maps in favor of OpenStreetMap.

It’s been clear for some time that Apple is looking for a way to wean itself off Google Maps. Apple has even purchased several mapping companies, including Placebase, an online-mapping company, and C3 Technologies, which creates 3-D maps.

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Mozilla Reconsiders, May Support WebP Image Format

By • On • In Interesting Facts, Web Technology

webp

WebP versus JPEG. Click the image to see the full size examples on Google’s WebP comparison page. Image: Google[/caption]

Want your website to load faster? Slim your images. According to the HTTPArchive, images account for roughly 60 percent of total page size. That means the single biggest thing most sites can do to slim down is to shrink their images.

We recently covered how you can cut down your website’s page load times using Google’s image-shrinking WebP format. Unfortunately, one of the downsides to WebP is that only Opera and Chrome support it. But that may be about to change — Firefox is reconsidering its decision to reject WebP.

The change of heart makes sense since most of the objections Firefox developers initially raised about WebP have since been addressed. However, Firefox hasn’t committed to WebP just yet. As Firefox developer Jeff Muizelaar writes on the re-opened bug report, “just to be clear, no decision on adopting WebP has been made. The only thing that has changed is that we’ve just received some more interest from large non-Google web properties which we never really had before.”

Whatever the case, if Firefox does land support for WebP it would help the fledgling format cross the line where more browsers support it than don’t, which tends to be the threshold for wider adoption.

If you’d like to experiment with WebP today, while still providing fallbacks for browsers that don’t support it, be sure to check out our earlier write-up.

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Chrome Extension Opens MS Office Docs in the Browser

By • On • In Uncategorized

chromeoffice

Google Chrome OS users have long enjoyed the ability to open Microsoft Office documents right in the web browser. Now Google is expanding its MS Office support to include Chrome on Windows and Mac as well.

The new Office Viewer beta is an extension for Google Chrome. You’ll need to be using Chrome 27 or better (currently in the beta channel), but provided you’re willing to use the prerelease version, you can install the new Office Viewer (also a beta release) from the Chrome Store.

The new extension can open most Microsoft Office files including .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx. The interface is very similar to the existing PDF view in Chrome and comes from QuickOffice, which Google acquired last year.

The main downside to the new plugin is that it’s definitely still a beta — very buggy and rough around the edges. In my testing two very simple spreadsheets simply didn’t open and selecting text in .docx Word documents was hit or miss; sometimes it worked, other times it was as if the document had been converted to an image.

On the plus side your MS Office files open in a specialized sandbox which protects you from any malware and viruses lurking in the files.

Still, there are enough rough edges that Chrome’s Office plugin isn’t ready for prime time. While it’s a necessity on Chrome OS, which has no Microsoft Office suite, everywhere else you’re probably better off using Google Drive to view files when you’re online (assuming you want to use Google services, Zoho Docs works well if you don’t), and Microsoft Office or Open/Libre Office when you’re not.

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Twitter’s new profile headers slammed

By • On • In Interesting Facts

Simple and consistent is the aim, but the results are questionable

 

Twitter rolls out iffy Facebook-style profile headers
Twitter’s new profile pics manage to obscure both text and images. It’s like 1998 all over again.

In issue 232 of .net magazine, we reported on Twitter seemingly becoming more akin to Facebook, as argued by Ben Popper for The Verge. Responding to .net at the time, social media expert Suw Charman-Anderson said: “The last thing that Twitter needs to be is ‘more akin to Facebook’, because people already have one Facebook and they don’t need another.” She argued the company had lost its way and also lost sight of what made it great in the first place, and that its website design has progressively gotten worse.

Today, Twitter announced all-new header photos, which appear to be rather similar to those Facebook introduced some months ago and that Google+ also uses. In Twitter’s case, the argument for the introduction and inclusion of such images is to “make your presence on Twitter more meaningful”, and to “help you get to know people better through their pictures,” according to Product Manager Sachin Agarwal. The reality is the profile now takes up more space, forcing down tweets. Worse, Silktide founder Oliver Embarton argued Twitter’s poor design potentially makes it harder, not easier, to discover more about someone: “Twitter is trying to ape Facebook’s cover images without realising what makes them work. Slapping profile text over the image renders the text illegible and the image obscured. It’s a total hash-up and I expect they’ll redesign it within a month.”