The nascent Web Open Font Format (WOFF) is getting a boost this week thanks to some new initiatives being kicked off by the W3C, the web’s governing body.

The W3C recently created a working group to build a WOFF into a web standard, and that group will be holding its first face-to-face meeting at the TypeCon 2010 conference taking place this week in Los Angeles.

Representatives from the major browser vendors, several font foundries and web services providers will be in attendance. Also, a dozen or so select individuals will be participating in a series of presentations and panel discussions about WOFF throughout the conference. All the design industry folks in attendance will get a peek at the future of high-quality typography on the web. There are scores of topics on the program, but this year, WOFF is getting top billing.

Things are looking up for web fonts in general. Monday, Webkit announced a partnership with Adobe to include the company’s fonts as part of its licensing service. Last month, Google launched a new tool (tied to its Font API) that makes it dead easy to include any of its open source fonts in website designs.

The Web Fonts working group was formed earlier this year at the W3C, and the group has already released the first working draft of the specification that will eventually lead to WOFF becoming a recommended web standard.

WOFF works just like OpenType and TrueType — you use the @font-face CSS property to drop the fonts in — but the font data is compressed, so the files download faster, and you can include more fonts in your designs without worrying as much about payload bloat.

The W3C adds this bit: “The WOFF format is not expected to replace other formats such as TrueType/OpenType/Open Font Format or SVG fonts, but provides an alternative solution for use cases where these formats may be less performant, or where licensing considerations make their use less acceptable.”

Support for WOFF is already strong — Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and Microsoft browsers either ship with or are building support, and the fast-moving foundries are releasing WOFF fonts — so why is the W3C’s involvement a big deal when the open source format is enjoying such success?

Standardization by the W3C is the best path to true interoperability. It will keep all the parties on the same page when it comes to things like accessibility, cross-browser compatibility, internationalization and search engine indexing. How much metadata to include and how it is handled are also big issues. Plus, fonts have taken an astonishingly long time to arrive on the web because of red tape around licensing, and a collaborative process for developing licensing infrastructures will go a long way toward convincing some of the more conservative type designers to make web-friendly versions of their creations.

The standard will take years to complete (the process is very slow — we’re guessing 2012 or so), and until then, we’ll see designers, developers and innovative service providers like Typekit and Google continue to feed the interest in fancy web fonts. Those not on the bleeding edge may be stuck in the boring world of “web safe” fonts for a while, but at least the future is bright.

TypeCon 2010 runs from August 17 through 20.

Photo by Leo Reynolds/Flickr/CC

See Also:

• Typekit Teams Up With Adobe to Offer More Web Fonts
• Dealing With the Dreaded ‘Flash of Unstyled Text’
• Test Drive Your Type With Google Font Preview

View full post on Webmonkey

Image: Out of the Box Games

Some people love word games. Some people really don’t. I’m somewhere in the middle. I really enjoy some word games very much, such as Boggle and Quiddler, but others aren’t as much fun, such as AmuseAmaze. So when I received a review copy of Letter Roll, I wasn’t sure on which side it would land.

Promoting itself to be “Everybody’s Word Game,” Letter Roll has many options that you can set depending on how difficult you want to make the game. It contains seven 20-sided dice. Two contain frequently used letters (white), three contain less frequently used letters (blue) and two use infrequently used letters (orange). The basic rules say to take turns rolling four of the seven dice and then choosing three of those on which to base your words. Each person writes down as many words as they can that use all of the shown letters. After time is up, you compare lists and cross out duplicates. Each remaining word scores one point. Because of this, unusual or extra long words may gain you points, while common words that everyone thinks up will probably get crossed off.

The rule sheet has some basic guidelines for play, such as how many rounds you play, and some variations for easier or more difficult games. But the beauty of this game is that you can make it as easy or hard, or as short or long as you want it to be. By giving you excellent game materials, you can even make up your own games.

You could make the game easier by rolling and choosing fewer dice, or make it much more difficult, by using more. Or you could restrict yourself to the more frequently or infrequently used letter dice. This game is incredibly adaptable for playing with mixed age groups, such as families. In addition to the different dice, there are two sand timers. One is a two minute timer, for a standard game, and the other is a one minute timer, for a fast game. Or you can use the timers as we did, using the two minute timer for the kids and the one minute timer for the adults. That way the kids have a built in advantage to have more time to write and think of words.

I like that the scoring is much simpler than Boggle, with just one point per word. Also, since misspellings are allowed (as long as the required letters are still present and aren’t incorrectly included), kids feel more free to write down difficult words. This definitely helps them learn spelling by taking a chance on words they wouldn’t ordinarily try to write.

After playing it a few times, I’ve decided that I do enjoy Letter Roll and I strongly recommend it to others who enjoy word games. I have played with just grownups, and also with a mix of kids and grownups. It works equally well both ways, especially when it is established that you’re playing to have fun, not necessarily to win. But it is easy to give the kids an advantage over the adults by changing the rules around a bit.

Letter Roll from Out of the Box Games is currently available on Amazon for about $17.

Wired: High quality dice, easy to learn, extremely easy to customize, enjoyable game play.

Tired: The sand timers aren’t as high quality as the other pieces, but they do their job.

View full post on GeekDad

Foxconn Retracts Letter Asking Employees Not to Kill Themselves
Turns to employee relocation, pay raises after yet another death

Read more on AnandTech

Dear HTC,

As you have noticed, the internet has been buzzing today with shots of your MyTouch Slide, aka HTC Espresso. I don’t know if you wanted photos of that device to be public yet, but what’s done is done.

A lot of people still carry G1s, and I have to assume since it’s still for sale, a fair number of people are buying them.  We do love our G1s, but they’re getting old and already can’t match your other new phones like Incredible or Evo. We could have moved on long ago, but we really, really love a keyboard, a G1 keyboard in particular. We are so happy with it that we have passed on your other models, waiting for THE ONE to come along.  You know, that phone that’s running Android 2.1 out of the box, that’s loaded with all the features the new phones have, as well as a nice keyboard that satisfies our desire to feel the button.

If what we have seen is the finished product, allow me to sum up what many people have said today in two simple words: I’ll pass.

Let me elaborate. It’s not the software that is the issue,  the OS is everything we love and have come to expect from Android. It’s the external design that you’re hearing the collective sighs of disappointment. I almost don’t know where to start, but let’s first examine the big draw: the keyboard. It’s awful. While the keypad on G1 was embedded under the body of the phone, this one appears to be a tray that snaps in. I don’t know the reasoning for this, as it seems to take up a lot more space, as does the larger size and placement of keys. Were there a lot of complaints about key size? Even if there were, there has to be a better layout. And I’m just going to pretend that top row doesn’t exist.  As it stands, the keyboard as a whole just looks cheap.

Speaking of cheap, let’s move on to the navigator button, circa HTC Touch. A feature that was used even before G1 came out. When your current devices are utilizing translucent balls or optical trackpads, that square pad feels like a bad trip to the past. I can only ask: why?

Why is also what I’m thinking when I look at the button on the far right. A stylized G? I always get the feeling when a standard thing is given a flashy makeover, it’s either to hide a flaw or to try to appeal to a group outside the normal demographic. Either way, I’m not liking it.

As a whole, MyTouch Slide just doesn’t seem to fit in with what you’re producing these days.  I still hold hope these design issues will be resolved by the time Slide hits the market. If not, I’ll still be clutching my G1 until a real upgrade comes along,  or it dies and I’m forced to make a choice I might not be entirely happy with. I hope it doesn’t come to that.

Sincerely,

Jolie Gendel

View full post on AndroidSPIN | Your No.1 source for Android news.

By now many of you have discovered that Gesture Search is available to all Android 1.6+ devices from the Market. Now question is… is it useful? Most people I have spoken to have given me something along the lines of, “Sort of, but it’s not as accessible as I’d like”. So while this is a Google Labs product, meaning it’s in the famous “BETA” stage, I have something for Google to take into consideration.

The issue here is that the gesture search is just not quick enough to access. While many have told me to put it on my homescreen, it’s still not any more useful than using the universal Google Search widget. So now all of the enlightened people are thinking well maybe Google should build it into apps like the contact list, GMail, or even in a homescreen widget. That might be all fine and dandy but let’s go back to what Android is all about. Android is all about collaboration and improvement as can be seen from the Open Handset Alliance’s initiatives. So why not make Google Gesture Search a developer tool? Gestures have long since been available to developers since Android 1.6, but think of all the uses developers could get out of universal search within their applications? Today, Android developers have an abundance of tools at their fingertips to improve all aspects of applications. AdMob to improve profitability, JTwitter to make twitter clients, Google Maps integration, and even GUI design via DroidDraw. All of these tools distributed for free so that developer’s can take them and make applications that are better than those on any other mobile platform.

I imagine being in a twitter client and searching my followers by drawing their name so that I can send them a direct message. How about being  in the Android Guys App and searching articles with gesture search? So why not make gesture search open and let developers run with it. Let us integrate it into applications, widgets, and more. Give the people what they want!

Sincerely,

The Android Community

Might We Suggest…

• New Mobile Search Features from Google
  Google rolled out a couple of handy new features on its mobile-optimized site late yesterday, making it easier to access search results on your phone that you generated previously on your desktop or l…

View full post on AndroidGuys