Author Archives: Matt

Better Google Fonts

July 18, 2011 – 9:46 pm

Google Web Fonts is an awe­some source of free, open source fonts hooked up to a world-class CDN. It’s also, sadly, filled with one-off nov­elty fonts vying for the title of “the new Comic Sans.” I quickly dis­cov­ered that a good met­ric for higher-quality fonts was the pres­ence of at least one alter­nate. The Google […]

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Environment Canada Mobile

June 13, 2011 – 9:56 am

The state of mobile weather apps isn’t awe­some. I find that it’s even worse in Canada, where weather data is sourced through non-Canadian providers such as Yahoo (iOS’s built-in weather app) or AccuWeather, nei­ther of which I find tend to pro­vide very good Cana­dian fore­cast data. Envi­ron­ment Canada is my go-to fore­cast provider, but their site […]

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FontFriend 3.2 Released: Now With More Google

June 6, 2011 – 10:28 pm

When I released Font­Friend 3.1, I men­tioned that Google Web Fonts didn’t have a proper API, mak­ing things dif­fi­cult. They still don’t have a pub­lic API, but on Thurs­day I was given “trusted tester” access to the new API. It won’t look that much dif­fer­ent, but there’ll be a few fonts work­ing now that weren’t […]

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Some Cranky WordPress Plugins

June 6, 2011 – 10:26 am

It looks like I may carve out a niche for cranky Word­Press plu­g­ins. This could either be seen as a per­son­al­ity flaw or as a per­fect fit within open-source cul­ture. In either case, Word­Press makes it easy for irri­ta­ble peo­ple to release plu­g­ins to change what they don’t like about it. I’ve done so twice […]

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FontFriend 3.1 Loves Google Webfonts

May 13, 2011 – 12:07 pm

I’ve had a num­ber of requests to bet­ter inte­grate Google Web­fonts into Font­Friend. They keep adding all these great fonts that any­one can use for free, and should be part of a tool like Font­Friend. The trou­ble was that they didn’t have an API, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult. More on that later, because I got it […]

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