After seeing that Ian’s learning Colemak, I decided to go for it too. Colemak is easier to switch to than Dvorak, and possibly even more efficient to boot. However, I couldn’t find a keyboard layout that I wanted to print and look at every day. I found a Mac Keyboard Vector with a CC license and […]
Category Archives: Design
Improve Windows Type Rendering With ttfautohint
August 22, 2011 – 11:48 am
In a stroke of genius, Werner Lemberg has started the ttfautohint project, which repurposes FreeType’s autohinting system to automatically hint TrueType fonts for improved Windows rendering. While no autohinter will be able to match the eye and skills of a manual hinter, ttfautohint provides real world improvements, sometimes dramatically. For example, I’m working as a […]
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 […]
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 […]
Redesign of mattwie.be
March 16, 2011 – 3:07 pm
I just launched my redesign of my personal blog mattwie.be (formerly mattwiebe.com) and I couldn’t be happier to finally have it live. This is a full-circle moment for me, as tweaking my blog (first on Blogger, later on WordPress) was what launched me into web development. After seeing that I could produce better code and […]