The Future of Reading

Apple updates iBooks with new book fonts

2011-12-09T12:15:00.001-08:00

An iBooks page, showing one of the new book fonts, Iowan, and the new Full Screen view.

Apple this week shipped a new version of its iBooks reader with four new fonts, picked especially for reading books on screen.

Although I love reading books on my iPad, I've always felt Apple could have done better for its iBooks reader than picking a selection from its OS fonts. Now it has...

The fonts include three serif faces - Iowan, Athelas and Charter - as well as the sans serif face, Seravek. The more observant will have noticed that it has replaced Verdana, which is gone.

The new fonts have been combined with other improvements, including a new Full Screen view which removes the visually distracting "page edges" graphic and leaves a beautifully clean reading page.

Iowan is a real gem of a book font. I'm currently reading a Robert Heinlein SF novel, in Iowan, in Full Screen mode, on my original iPad, and it's the best eBook reading experience I've had yet.

You might think I'd be irate about the loss of Verdana, as the person who originally commissioned Matthew Carter to design it in 1995 (it was my first major project after I took over as leader of Microsoft's Typography group in 1995)However, nothing could be farther from the truth. Verdana was originally intended to improve reading on the Web, and it was amazingly successful at doing that. It set a whole new standard for reading on the Web. But with its large x-height and very generous spacing, it never felt comfortable as an eBook font.

Verdana's serif stablemate, Georgia - also designed by Matthew - is a better book face. Indeed, until Apple shipped its new faces this week, Georgia was probably the best and most popular font picked by customers for reading on their iPads and iPhones.

The view that Verdana and Georgia are not very suitable for eBooks is not merely personal. When I was part of Microsoft's eBooks team, we decided that neither was good enough for the sustained reading involved in books. So we built a new version of the serif font, Berling, for Microsoft Reader running on PCs, laptops and dedicated eBook devices (we had a 150ppi, full-color, book-sized prototype device of our own which we had built). For the smaller screens of PDAs and phones, we built a new version of Frutiger in collaboration with Linotype - called Frutiger Linotype.

The fact that we spent so much time and money creating new faces - when we already owned Verdana and Georgia outright and had spent a great deal of money on hinting, character set coverage etc., speaks for itself.

Georgia may previously have been the best iBooks font. But I for one never felt totally comfortable with it as a book face. There's something very dark and "vertical" about the way it feels.

I'm guessing what I'm feeling at an intuitive level harks back to the original design constraints. The brief to Matthew was to design two new typefaces - one serif and one sans serif - specifically for reading onscreen at the then-current screen resolutions of between 88 and 96 pixels per inch.This was three years before we'd invented ClearType, when lack of resolution on screens was felt more in the horizontal axis than in the vertical (at least for Latin-based languages).

So Matthew began by creating optimal screen bitmaps for the fonts at the two most important sizes for reading - 10 and 12 point. The resolution-independent outlines were created only after we knew the exact bitmaps we wanted at those sizes, and the outlines were then hinted to make sure those were what the Windows TrueType rasterizer actually generated.

The point of going over all this history is really just to say that Verdana and Georgia were the best anyone could do for reading on a screen back in 1995. But with screen resolutions of 133ppi for today's iPads (soon to be double that if the rumors about iPad 3 are true) and the stunning resolution of the iPhone's Retinal Display, we can do better, 20 years on.

If you have an iPad or iPhone, give Iowan and Full Screen a whirl. I think you'll like it...

Should Apple and Amazon REALLY Control eBook Design?

2011-10-02T12:33:00.000-07:00

Who's in control of your book design? You - or Amazon and Apple?

This post is not meant as a criticism of either Amazon or Apple. Each has done more to push forward the adoption and availability of eBooks than any other company since the first text appeared on a computer screen. Thanks to them, we now have a large installed base of reading devices, and hundreds of thousands of book titles available in eBook formats.

However, I've spent most of my working life thinking at least ten years ahead. (That's as much a curse as a blessing. Ten years is too far for most managers to even contemplate - far less support).

I'm thinking of the future of eBooks. Now that these two companies have finally taken eBooks mainstream, it's time we - and they - began thinking more about their design. People like Jan Tschichold spent their lives considering and implementing good book design. Yet in eBooks, the tail is still wagging the dog. Design of eBooks today is driven more by the functionality of eBook reading software and short-term competitive goals than by either aesthetics or art.

Great book design is high art combined with a deep understanding of how humans read.

eBooks can be every bit as beautiful and readable as printed books. This post contains some suggestions for moving the field forward. It is based on months of research, hands-on eBook development, and many years of thought.

ANY COLOR YOU WANT, AS LONG AS IT'S BLACK...

Amazon really started the eBook ball rolling with Kindle. It's a low-cost device, holds plenty of books, has a battery that runs for days, and was linked into Amazon's already-massive paper book-selling website and delivery system. Yes, there were other devices before it, but Kindle's the one that achieved critical mass first.

Then along came Apple with the iPad - a far more versatile device, used for many things besides reading - with an iBooks app that in my opinion creates a far better experience.

Some of you will jump on this assertion and declare your preference for the Kindle, especially now that Amazon has announced its own $199 tablet device. But it's revealing that in all the hoopla of the Kindle Fire announcement, there was no mention - zero - of how the Kindle reader software might be updated to take advantage of the new color capability. Like Henry Ford, Jeff Bezos still seems to think that you can have your eBook in any color you want - as long as it's black-and-white. Perhaps he has a surprise up his sleeve. It's significant that Amazon has made no mention of the Stanza Reader since it acquired Lexcycle...

However, the only option I can see in Kindle Fire today which would support color and typography is to produce your eBook as a PDF - and what a backward step THAT would be!
Some of my thinking is definitely based on the future potential of eBooks. But it's surprising how much design you can put into an eBook, even today, provided the device and the software support more than black-and-white text in one font...

That's why the experiments I've been doing over the past few months have focused on iBooks running on the iPad. They have convinced me that there's a great future for eBook design if the right kind of collaboration takes place.

Books are too important to the human race for this not to happen.

Just one example of the thought that went into printed book design...

In this post I want to focus on typefaces and sizes in eBooks, and how current options in eBook readers - both iBooks and the Kindle app on the iPad - place brutal constraints on book design. I also want to start outlining a better approach which is easy to implement and would pass greater control of eBook design back to the graphic designer and typographer, where it belongs.

WOULD YOU LIKE PMN CAECILIA? OR PMN CAECILIA?

Let's first explore the font and size options available today...

iBooks currently includes six typeface choices. Of those, only two - Georgia and Palatino - create an acceptable reading experience. iBooks also supports embedded fonts, which I've been researching intensively while I create the lavishly-illustrated iBooks version of Tanya's book: "Sanctuary - Wetland Birds of Kauai".

The Kindle app is even worse. While its PMN Caecilia typeface is pretty readable, the reader has no option to change it. And Kindle does not support embedded fonts at all.
Embedded fonts can make an iBook look terrific. I've shown sample pages in earlier posts on this blog.

I'm beginning to develop an eBooks Design Manifesto. Here are my first three "demands":

eBook readers should give designers and publishers complete control over what fonts to use in their books, and support the full range of typefaces available today by enabling font embedding.
Since typefaces are an integral and vital factor in design, the designer should have the ability to disable inbuilt font choices.
The font industry should make using fonts in eBooks identical to using them in a printed book: Provided you have purchased a legitimate copy of the fonts, you should be able to use them to create as many millions of as many books as you wish.

When desktop publishing first appeared in the 1980s I was there, and deeply involved. It created a huge "gold rush" for the font industry, which found that millions of people who'd never even thought about fonts suddenly found they wanted as many as they could get their hands on. What was formerly a small niche market to professional designers and the print industry exploded to become a mainstream one. The same could easily happen again. Chances are this new gold rush would be even larger, since distribution of eBooks is essentially free and democratic in a way that print never was, and cost-of-entry is almost zero, enabling more people to publish books than ever before.

SIZE MATTERS

Now, let's turn to type sizes...

Kindle has a number of predetermined font size choices. IMO, the smallest is too small for comfortable reading, the next size up is too large, and it just gets worse from there...

iBooks is better. It has ten text size increments on the iPad, including some very readable size options. My personal view is that the smallest one or two sizes are unreadable, while the largest two or three are not only unreadable, but turn any design aspirations into a joke. They're clearly meant to satisfy the "Accessibility" needs of people who do indeed need very large text. But they don't work the way they are today. True Accessibility requires a more thoughtful, better-designed solution.

I believe passionately that the reader should be able to change type sizes, to allow "large print", for instance. Fixed Layout ePubs are backward-looking, a short-term expediency hack, and an evolutionary dead end.

However, I believe just as passionately in a truth that every designer knows: design does not scale arbitrarily. Changing type size - especially by significant amounts - entails changing, or at least adjusting, the basic design.

There's an easy way this can be done, with little effort. As a research project, I've produced two separate editions of Tanya's book. The only difference between the two is that I use a different CSS style sheet for each case. All of the other XHTML is identical, except for the style sheet links.

You could use Javascript to switch CSS. But it would involve an intrusive additional piece of UI. If your ePub book is broken into separate XHTML files for each chapter, you'd need to ensure that not only did a choice made in the first chapter persist throughout the book, but that the size-change UI was always available.

There's an easy way to do this. Apple's iBooks menu already has "Smaller Text/Larger Text buttons. So here's the third demand of my manifesto:

eBook readers should offer a set of APIs to allow a designer to hook into their Smaller Text/Larger Text UI and call the appropriate stylesheet, instead of the arbitrary scaling of today.

It might be that the designer wants to include a full ten size options (I can't think why, but you never know). If only three were offered, the appropriate button would gray out when the top or bottom size was reached.

True design for eBooks is still to come. It is up to us as writers, designers, typographers and publishers to regain control over design in the digital future of books, and ensure that 550 years of book-publishing experience does not become lost in the transition.

Let's allow Jan Tschichold to sleep easily in his grave...

Publishing for iPad: My iBooks Workspace...

2011-09-25T18:05:00.000-07:00

My MacBookPro screen set up for iBook work

I've found this a great setup for working on iBooks on my 17" MacBook Pro, and I decided to share it in case it's of use to anyone else.

One of the problems with building and editing iBooks is that to see them displayed properly you really have to see them on an iPad. That's a process with many steps:

Save your XHTML, CSS and Image files on your computer
Run ePubZip on the parent folder of your book to generate ePub
Run ePubCheck to find and fix errors
Delete the old version of your book from iTunes
Delete the old version from your iPad
Drag the new version into iTunes
Synch your iPad
Open the book

If you're tweaking the CSS or the XHTML markup, having to do this every time is tedious beyond description.

However, the text rendering inside iBooks is done using Webkit - the same engine that Safari uses. While iBooks does not offer all the Webkit features, its rendering is close enough for most purposes. So a Safari window about the width of an iBook screen will let you view changes instantly.

Make changes
Save file
Hit Refresh in Safari

And you see the changes. It makes experimenting with styles, font sizes etc in your CSS stylesheet quick and painless.

The top window on the right-hand side holds the parent folder of the book. The window below that contains the ePub tools.

Once you have the files the way you want them, generating the ePub is just a matter of dragging the top-level folder of your book onto the ePubZip icon.

Once the ePub has been generated, dragging its new icon onto the ePubCheck icon runs the check. When completed, that pops up a window listing errors, and also puts a text file containing them into the same folder as your ePub.

Elsewhere on my Mac, I have a "Working Archives" folder. As often as I can remember, I make a copy of the latest working ePub and drop it in there, in case I mess up the one on which I'm working.

It's not a very complex setup - or probably even very original. It grew organically as I worked, and is the most efficient and pain-free I've found so far. The process of building an iBook by hand needs all the help it can get - especially when you're working with a book of 17 chapters, with more than 30 full-screen color illustrations so far.

Incidentally, Apple's Publisher Guide suggests that you should use embedded fonts for short sections only - for example, to show a hand-written letter using a script font. However, I've proved to my satisfaction that the embedded font technology in iBooks, the ePub format and iBooks itself are more than robust enough to deal with Tanya's 128-page, illustrated bird book, which so far is 12.8Mb in size...

eBook Design and Authoring: Back to Hammer and Chisel...

2011-09-19T18:41:00.000-07:00

Font embedding in an iBook

Been a while since I posted anything here, because I've been pretty busy for the past few months...
First, I had a two-month full-time contract, working on a project I can't talk about but which was definitely pushing forward the future of reading on screens.
Second, I started work on a iBooks version of a book my wife Tanya's been working on for years. It is the result of years of research, and also years of painting the wetland birds on the island of Kauai. Tanya's an amazing artist - I've posted examples of her work on this blog a few times.
I've always wanted to publish the book, but I felt it was time to try to "walk the talk", and publish the first version for the iPad.
I picked iBooks on the iPad for a number of reasons:

It uses the open ePub format
It supports color
At 133ppi, it has enough resolution to do a decent job of the text
It supports eBooks with embedded fonts

Fonts in eBook readers or devices are still pretty primitive:

iBooks: Offers six reading fonts. Only two - Georgia and Palatino - are worth using.
Kindle: You can have any font you want as long as it's PMN Caecilia.
Stanza: Any of the iOS fonts (which again leaves you with Georgia and Palatino)
Nook: Seven or eight fonts, all of them poorly rendered.

However, the saving grace of iBooks is that it does support embedded fonts. Its lovely color screen makes Tanya's color illustrations sing, and if the rumor mill is to be believed, iPad3 will have a 266ppi display which will set a new standard for onscreen readability (I'm ignoring the Retinal Display on the iPhone. It's beautiful, but so small it's not the screen on which you'd want to read a work like this).

We Need Power Tools, Not A Hammer...

Authoring eBooks should be easy. After all, Pages (Apple's word processor) and InDesign both offer "Export to ePub", while Word lets you output HTML. I've been bitten by Word's HTML before - it's incomprehensible to humans. And it's revealing that Liz Castro's book: "ePub: Straight To The Point" seems to spend the first 168 of its 228 pages explaining exactly why output from InDesign and Word sucks, and what you need to do to fix it.
It's worth using one of these tools for one reason - they do generate a unique identifier for your book, and the skeleton structure of an ePub, with its TOC.ncx and content.opf files, etc, all in the correct places.
But I'm afraid that's about it. Both seem to generate XHTML that's verbose and hard to follow, and a CSS style sheet with at least three times as many styles as you need - again, all with incomprehensible names.
I tried my best with each of the tools, outputting ePub, using ePubUnzip to break that apart into the editable files and editing them. But it was just too painful. Eventually I ended up retaining only the skeletal structure, falling back to a text editor (I'm using TextWrangler) and doing the whole process by hand. At least that way I might have some chance of understanding what's going on.
It took me a while, and a lot of experimentation. But I eventually got embedded fonts working. I'd experimented in Pages and InDesign - easier places for prototyping than XHTML and CSS - and settled on ITC Korinna. It comes in four weights, and you can use them to build a nice set of styles. Korinna isn't the face I would use for all-text books. But it has a nice character which I liked for this particular, nature-based, content - and the headings look great in red.
I had been experimenting with a three-line chapter heading style: a strap line in the roman, a main heading in bold, and a bottom line in italics, used for the Latin name of each of the birds.
Once I had something I was happy with, I created an XHTML page and a set of CSS styles. I played around with the leading of the main heading, to try to tuck the Latin tightly underneath it.
I'm pleased with the result so far - although it doesn't work if the reader makes the iBook text too big. If the heading wraps to two lines, the negative leading causes ugly problems.
This raises an interesting philosophical question: Does a designer have to create a design that works for all sizes? Just because iBooks supports ten text sizes, does your book have to? My design works for about half of the size choices. I plan to do some more tweaking to see if I can improve on that. But the very largest and smallest text sizes in iBooks are, in my view, unreadable. The five or six "middle" sizes give an adequate range of "large print" options, without forcing design compromises. Of course, I could always specify a single fixed size for all the text - but that would defeat one of the best features of an eBook. It would be nice if the designer could disable some of the reader's text size options, retaining the ones that worked for the design.
My contention is that Apple is not a "book design" company. Just because you can give the reader ten or more text sizes, that doesn't mean you always should.

Full-page illustration in the iBook © Tanya Hill, 2011

I began the book with a single XHTML file containing all the text. I knew that was not practical in the long term, but it let me get started getting the text formatting right. However, debugging a single huge file is painful.
In addition, I wanted to use Tanya's illustrations full-page, as large as possible. I'd found a Public Domain version of the Arthur Rackham-illustrated edition of "Alice In Wonderland". The text of this book, and the way it's wrapped around some of the black-and-white illustrations, leaves a lot to be desired and breaks badly when the reader scales text size.
However, it had a nice trick for creating full-pages of the full-color Rackham illustrations, so I poked around until I found out how it was done. It involves creating a separate XHTML file for each illustration, and using the ePub's NavMap and TOC to call them in the right order, between chapters.
Some of Tanya's longer chapters have up to five illustrations. So I guess I'll be breaking those into sub-chapters...
Today, I got the first 17 illustrations into place - one at the start of each chapter. And I also ran the excellent ePub Validator at http://threepress.org/document/epub-validate/ - many, many times, until I'd killed off the last of the initial 96 errors the first run found.
Then I put the ePub into iTunes and synched my iPad. The illustrations worked great! But in the process of breaking my initial single XHTML file into 17 parts, I somehow broke font embedding again. So it's back to debugging until I get that fixed.
If you hadn't already gathered by now, this post looks like being the first in a series - the book is a work in progress.
It shouldn't be this hard. If Tolstoy came back today, and wanted to write War And Peace as an eBook, he shouldn't have to become an XHTML and CSS jockey in order to do it. Writers should just be able to write, without needing to learn scripting or programming.
Watch this space, as the saga continues...

Kindle: From "Library Of The 21st Century" to "Landfill" In One Easy Lesson...

2011-04-07T14:29:00.000-07:00

One dead Kindle eInk display. You can see a fragment of the old "screensaver" display at the bottom right.

I've hardly used my (Version 2) Kindle at all since I got my iPad. The larger, brighter iPad screen makes the Kindle display look positively Victorian. I installed the Kindle app on it, transferred all my books, set up synchronization so I could read on the Kindle if I needed to, then promptly forgot about it. It's been sitting in a corner of our bedroom.

Well, today Tanya wanted to use the iPad. For some time, I've been meaning to get an iPad 2 - for this very reason - but haven't yet got around to it. I thought I'd wait until the rush died down a bit. On reflection I should have tried to pick one up at the company store when I visited Apple in Cupertino a few days ago :(

Anyway, there's a book I bought a couple of days ago that I want to read, so I thought I'd resurrect the Kindle and make do with that for a day or two.

It hasn't been charged in a while, so I knew I'd have to do that before anything else. I plugged it into the wall, waited for a while until I knew it would have a charge, and opened the cover to switch it on.

I knew right away there was a problem, even before I hit the power switch. In place of the full-screen screensaver image Kindle normally displays when you shut it down, or when it powers itself off after a period of inactivity, you could see only a fraction of the original image. The rest of the display was split into two rectangular areas, each a different shade of gray.

The Kindle support site on Amazon suggested that low battery might cause this problem. The suggested remedy is to charge the device for a few minutes (did that), then unplug it and reset it by sliding the Power switch and holding it in that position for 15 seconds.

The screen flickers for a few seconds - seeming to go through the XOR flashing familiar to anyone who's ever turned a Kindle page, but then goes back to the same display as before. It's as if the fragment of graphic is burned into part of the display, while the rest of the display has ceased to, well, display anything...

So there we are. Another useless piece of plastic for which I paid $249.

Anyone who's been reading this blog will know I've never been very impressed with eInk, which I view as a technological dead end. Since it depends on aligning millions of tiny black-and-white balls in the display by physically turning them, IMO it's a technology which cannot be taken far enough to give us the kind of display brightness, contrast, color and performance to which we've become accustomed.

Sure, it gives great, great battery life. But the 10 hours between charges on my iPad is not merely an Apple claim - it's real, and it's plenty for anything I've ever wanted to do. And it's a great display - among the best I've been. The use of in-plane technology gives a crispness that belies its 132ppi resolution.

And for me that was a killer factor in iPad v. Kindle. I don't have to pay the price of a sub-optimal display in order to get the battery life I need.

If the display can't be left to itself for a while without degrading to the point where it's useless, that makes Kindle completely unacceptable.

The Kindle's still working. When I connect it to my MacBook Pro with USB, I can see the Kindle drive. All my books are still there. I just can't read them any more because the display's dead.

I'll try one more thing: leaving it on to charge until the "charging" light goes out and I know the battery's fully charged. Then I'll try another reset. I'll let you know how that goes, but I'm not hopeful.

UPDATE: The Kindle was charging as I was writing this. The charge light turned green, which means the battery's fully charged. And the display's behaving exactly the same. From "Library of the 21st Century" to "Landfill" in one easy lesson...

UPDATE 2: Called Amazon. They volunteered an immediate replacement, although my Kindle's out of warranty. Great customer service, great service representative. A company can't really do better than that...

Flipboard: Your Own Magazine For News And Social Networking On The iPad

2010-11-07T12:11:00.000-08:00

The Flipboard front page(s). You can add as many sources as you like; Flipboard creates new pages to hold them.

Forgive me if this blog is starting to look like it's all about the iPad; that's where all the most interesting developments in on-screen reading are happening right now. The appearance, not only of a great device for reading, but almost overnight an installed base of millions, has triggered a flood of iPad reading apps for newspapers, magazines and books. I'd be interested to find out, for example, what proportion of Kindle books bought from Amazon are - being reading in the Kindle app on iPads...

I just counted "reading" apps on my own iPad. There are 18, including a number of "generic" eBook readers, as well as apps for individual magazines like Wired.

I've been reading the New York Times every day for weeks now. The iPad app is a great experience. It really is like reading a newspaper, with professional content - except that it's even better, since I no longer have to fold and unfold it, manipulate huge sections. etc.

Whether it's good enough that I'll be prepared to pay a subscription for it from next year is another question.

I've been spending a lot more time every day on my iPad than on my laptop. One of the reasons is the Flipboard app, which not only allows you to aggregate your own news and social networking sites, but displays the content in very clean, pleasing layout with lots of white space.

Facebook, given the Flipboard treatment.

Reading the posts on my Facebook page is a lot more pleasant using Flipboard. It's like a magazine; I flip through "pages" of posts, rather than scrolling down through an endless window. Double-tapping on an entry zooms it to a full page, where you can read others' or add your own comments.

Flipboard does fall down on video. Since the iPad does not support Flash, videos in Flipboard won't play. Apple itself got around this issue for YouTube with a YouTube app; it's not outwith the bounds of possibility that this could be somehow hooked in to Flipboard to enable video, but it's definitely an issue right now.

The BBC News website

The BBC news website is simply a joy to read this way. Again, instead of scrolling, you flip through pages like you're reading a magazine. When you want to read a full piece, double-tapping takes you to a full window, where you have the option to "Read on Web". That dumps you back into Safari. It would be nice to see Flipboard go a level deeper, and give you a paginated version of the story, with the same clean layout it uses for headings.

However, for an app which launched only in July, it's made a huge leap forward in combining news and social networking websites in one, easy-to-use and comfortable UI. I have a lot of ideas on how Flipboard could move forward to become a premiere app for iPad users. It would also be interesting to see how the lessons of Flipboard could be applied to websites viewed and laptops and desktops.

I've included some more screen shots from my iPad below to show just how attractive Flipboard makes these sites.

Flipboard's own news aggregator.

New York Times World News.

Another magazine-style layout of news from the BBC website.

Facebook: the social networking magazine, Flipboard-style.

Nice treatment of photographs posted by one of my FB friends.

iPad eMagazines: HTML5 Takes Us Another Step Forward...

2010-10-30T20:58:00.000-07:00

Esquire: Using HTML5 instead of JPEG and Flash. Beautiful layout and typography. Pity the content's so targeted to rich, self-indulgent males...

Three posts ago, I showed a collection of different magazines and newspapers in their newest iPad versions - which I pointed out were beautiful castles built on sand, in that they all used JPEG representations to create their onscreen pages.

The version of Wired magazine I showed was a whopping 590+ Mbyte download. Even with the daily-increasing availability of storage, it's hard to see how anyone could keep their iPad storage from becoming cluttered after a few months.

However, one of my typography friends on Facebook posted a fascinating link to a company called Scrollmotion, which is creating thousands of applications for the iPad, many of them highly quality magazines.

One of the magazines now available in the iPad App Store is Esquire. I have to say, as far as content is concerned, it's really not my cup of tea. However, it is beautifully typeset and laid out, with very high quality photographs, graphics and advertising, and it's a great demonstration of what you can do.

It was created with HTML 5 – not JPEG and Flash pages - and is about a sixth of the size of the issue of Wired magazine which I reviewed in my earlier post.

It's highly readable. It looks beautiful. There are some problems: it still doesn't scale, for instance. But the fact that it's created using HTML means that setting and layout can become more flexible and adaptable in future. With the JPEG pages used in wired magazine, there was absolutely no way forward; the pages might just as well been cast in stone.

I'd be interested to know from anyone technically-inclined out there whether these apps are using common system resources to do their text composition and layout g. I certainly hope so. It would be insane if each magazine or newspaper had to do its own.

This issue of Esquire magazine has an interesting opening gimmick, using out-of-focus video which sharpens and then freezes to become the front cover. I presume – since Flash is outlawed on the iPad - that this also uses HTML5. It works very well.

This is a big step forward. Be interesting to see where it leads. It still seems weird to me that each magazine and newspaper is its own iPad app, unlike eBook, for instance, in which there's a "Library" with titles. I've no doubt someone will figure out the "personal magazine rack".

Publishers, though, are still giving themselves an easy life by focusing on the iPad alone. We'll have to see how they cope - or whether they even try - when Android-powered tablets begin to appear, and also the new Windows 7 tablets.

A lot will depend on whether enough of them are sold to create a competitive platform to the iPad.

I have to say that the more I use my own iPad, the more I think Apple has got it right, and the Windows-powered tablets are not really competing in the same space at all.

I use my Pad now much more than I use my laptop; for reading books, magazines, the New York Times, checking Facebook and my Windows Live Mail. If I want to type a document, or create video, then I go to the laptop. But when consuming, the iPad wins every time. I sit in a recliner and read, comfortably.

I have two devices, where I used to ask one device to do two jobs - and of course ended up with an unsatisfactory compromise. I didn't know that until I began using the iPad intensively. It's definitely my first "goto" device, and the laptop's a fallback. The iPad's "touchy-feely", but in an imprecise way. I don't want to do detail with my fingers - just find what I want and turn the pages.

There are some great apps out there. One of my favorites is the PBS app - great nature and history videos to watch in bed, using headphones if you don't want to wake your partner. I'm getting quite addicted to the New York Times. I guess that's what they're counting on by making it free just now, with plans to convert to paid-for subscription next year. The TED app's another favorite.

A Windows TabletPC is still both devices in one. Apple has taught me that's not what I want. I was extremely skeptical that Apple could really demonstrate a new product niche in between the mobile phone and the laptop. But that's exactly what they appear to have done. You'd have to prise it from my dead fingers if you wanted to take it away now.

Barnes & Noble's Nook Goes LCD - While Amazon and NYT Go iPad...

2010-10-27T17:55:00.000-07:00

The new Nook, announced yesterday, with an LCD screen: B&N claim 8-hour battery life.

I forecast quite some time ago that when the first LCD screen-based eBook reader with acceptable battery life appeared, it would blow away eInk-based devices like Amazon's Kindle. A few posts ago, I wrote about how Apple's iPad had done exactly that.

It seems Barnes & Noble agree. Yesterday B&N announced a new LCD-based version of its Nook reader. The device has a claimed 8-hour battery life, and its seven-inch screen has 1024 x 600 pixels.

The previous incarnation of the Nook seemed like a crazy device to me. With a tiny LCD screen so you could browse your library of books with colored jackets, and shop in color - but an eInk screen for reading - it seemed to be neither one thing nor the other.

The Nook, which uses the Google Android operating system, has already come in for some criticism because it is not an open development platform, but will attempt to establish the kind of AppStore at which Apple has been so successful.

B&N isn't Apple, which not only has millions of iPad customers, but hundreds of millions of iPhone customers who buy apps from the same store. It's hard to see B&N's closed app store effort succeeding. Only time will tell.

The device itself is attractively priced at $249. Be interesting to watch how this unfolds. I would not be surprised to see an iPad price drop eventually - although with devices flying off the shelves as fast as Apple can manufacture them, it doesn't seem like there's much incentive to cut prices at the moment...

Speaking of iPad and eReading, Amazon did a nice piece of work this week in improving its Kindle business on Apple's device.

As I've already mentioned, I find the Amazon Kindle Reader app the best reading experience on the iPad so far. I use it every day.

One of the least satisfactory features of Kindle on iPad, though, was when you pressed the "Shop in Kindle Store" button, and ended up on the Kindle section of Amazon's website. The website was fairly awkward to navigate on the iPad; its UI was definitely not optimized for that scenario.

Yesterday I installed Amazon's new "Windowshop" app on my iPad - and that's a pretty, easy-to-use way to shop for books that's much more suited to the iPad's touch screen.

My theory is that Amazon has seen a huge uptick in sales of Kindle books due to the appearance of the iPad, and it's going full-out to capitalize on that.

Another great new reading app on the iPad is the full version of the New York Times, replacing the former NYT "Editor's Choice" app. Now you get a full newspaper, with all the different sections. I've been reading it every day, and it's a joy!

The New York Times on the iPad is currently free. They plan to start charging for it sometime next year. Not sure how well that's going to fly. It is good enough that I'm almost tempted; we'll see what price they plan to charge...

Voice Recognition: Blogging With My Eyes Closed - And No Keyboard!

2010-10-16T15:32:00.000-07:00

This blog entry is an experiment. I'm going to try speaking it instead of typing it, using Dragon Dictate voice recognition software for the Mac. I don't expect it to be perfect, but if it gets even 95% of the way, then it will make writing very different.

I bought a copy of the voice recognition software only yesterday, so I'm still coming to terms with it. But it seems to have no trouble at all dealing with my Scottish accent, now I've gone through a couple of voice training exercises to teach it my pronunciation. You can also use this recognition software to execute commands, although I haven't tried that yet.

My friend Peter May, who has been professional writer for many years, and was a colleague of mine on the Scotsman newspaper in Glasgow in the 1970s, says he had a very unsatisfying experience with the same software. However, I have to say that my own test has been pretty amazing. The process of writing has become much easier.

I began working with this voice recognition software using the Macintosh's built-in internal microphone, which is not recommended, and I was really surprised how well it worked. Then, I remembered that I had a LG-30 Bluetooth headset which I bought for my mobile phone and no longer use. Again, this is not one of the recommended headsets for the software. But I thought I'd give it a try anyway.

You have to hand it to Apple. You really have to hand it to Apple. I switched on the headset, the Macintosh recognized it right away, and asked me if I would like to use it as the preferred audio device. As soon as I confirmed that I did, it began to work. Then I did a microphone test using the voice recognition software, and that worked, too. After that it was just a case of doing a couple of voice training exercises, and the accuracy began to get really amazing.

I've been a writer since I was about seven years old. But I'm a terrible typist. Anyone who's ever seen me at work knows I use only two fingers, and hammer a keyboard into submission. I never learned touch typing. I'm also a terrible mis-typist. I always have to go back over what I wrote and correct it. The word-processor was an incredible improvement over the typewriter for me for its editing ability alone.

There's something else about typing. Somehow, I can never write conversationally when I'm using a keyboard. The process gets in the way. So, even if what I speak isn't transcribed with 100% accuracy, it still removes a layer between the thoughts and the words on the screen with which I've always struggled to some extent...

So I've been dictating this whole blog while laid on my back on a sofa, with my eyes closed. How cool is that?

One of the things I've always noticed about my writing is that it has a character completely different to my speech. I've done a lot of public speaking, to audiences as large as 25,000. I've managed to keep an audience of 3000 people in their seats for more than an hour while talking about typography, the future of reading, and some of the work I've been involved in over the years. I'm hoping that the ability to just speak will bring some of that dynamic to my writing.

The future of writing concerns me almost as much as the future of reading. The whole process of publishing has changed dramatically. Anyone can publish on the web. This is a good thing - very good - but it also means that the amount of noise has gone up incredibly. Finding the good from amongst the mediocre gets harder all the time.

When publishing meant printing, the would-be author had to fight his or her way through many layers and filters before the printing press began to roll. Perhaps that battle was too hard. But at least there was some kind of filtering system that more or less worked. If a story got to the front page of the newspaper, you could pretty much guarantee that it was important.

One of the disadvantages of this much more open publishing environment is that it's becoming more and more difficult for someone to make a living as a full-time creative person. It's not just that you have to claw your way to the top of a much bigger heap of material. The Internet has spawned a whole generation which believes all content is - or should be - free.

It's great that amateur writers can now get published. But writing a book, for instance, is a commitment that might involve someone spending a year or more working full-time on it. People have been willing to make that kind of commitment in the past, because they view it as a long-term investment that will eventually pay off.

It's the same with music. Yes, of course people do it out of love. But they do eventually need to be able to make a living from it.

Okay, that's the blog post done. It did take a bit of editing, but no more than I would normally do anyway. I have to say I really like this process, and I'll be using it again. I'm pretty sure that it can only get better the more I use it.

Unfortunately, there is no trial version of the software. So if you want to try it for yourself, you'll have to pay the $180 for the online download version, or $199 with the boxed product, which includes a USB headset. Dragon Dictate for the Mac. http://www.macspeech.com. I can only say I'm very happy with my investment.

System Requirements: Intel-based Mac with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Internet connection required for product registration. Nuance-approved USB microphone for Mac (included with new boxed-product purchase).

iPad Magazines - Beautiful Castles, But A Future Built On Sand...

2010-09-15T15:11:00.000-07:00

Fig. 1 - The cover of the iPad edition of Wired.

If you were one of the defenders of the Amazon Kindle reading device to jump into the comments fray after my last post - in which I stated that the iPad had blown the Kindle hardware out of the water - then you've failed to understand what this blog is all about.

Look at the title at the top: It's not "The Future of eBooks". It's "The Future of Reading"...

Commenters mostly ask the same questions, or make the same statements: What about the new Kindle, which is smaller and has better contrast, it's really cheap, much lighter than the iPad, the battery runs for a lot longer? Isn't it a better reading device?

They may be completely correct from their own (limited) viewpoint. For me, personally I can't go back to a Kindle now without feeling somehow cheated after the enriched reading environment of the iPad.

Leaving aside the issue of readability in sunlight v. readability at night, every one of the commenters in favor of Kindle is still talking about reading only text, about books without color photographs and illustrations, great layout and typography, or video.

The iPad offers the vision of a future which offers not only all that, but the emergence of a new business model which can include paid-for or free content - the latter perhaps funded by a superb advertising platform, creating a publishing business model that actually works...

Kindle defenders are looking at the world now, whereas I'm trying to envisage publishing ten years into the future.That's always been my horizon.

So let me try to explain how the iPad has confirmed my longer-term vision for onscreen reading. A word of caution. It might look as if that future is already here - far from it. All of the beautiful-looking edifices I'll be showing in this post are real - but so far they're all built on sand...

Every one of these illustrations is an iPad screenshot of real content. They're all magazines or "newspapers". You can buy them today. And the sophistication of the layouts displayed clearly demonstrates that beautifully-laid-out books are also completely possible.

The first "emagazine" I bought was a copy of Wired. As you can see from Fig. 1, the cover is stunning. The high-quality photography, layout and typography you'd expect. Now walk with me through a selection of lovely screenshots from some more iPad publications. It's worth clicking on each of them to see the original full-size pages. See you after the last graphic!

Fig. 2 - Wired again, an inside page. Lovely, clean layout, great use of graphics and type.

Fig 3 - Another inside page combines a photograph with great type and precisely-placed graphic elements.

Fig. 4 - Same great layout, precision text and graphics, this time combined with video.

Fig. 5 - Leave it to the French to demonstrate real style in a eMagazine - the cover of the free promotional issue of ParisMatch.

Fig. 6 - Inside page of ParisMatch. Lovely, clean layout, great use of type, photographs, graphics.

Fig. 7 - It wasn't the Dior model that made me salivate when I saw this - it was the thought of how many of the advertisers who sustain magazines today would be lining up to pay for ads of this quality. Elsewhere in the same edition of ParisMatch there were similarly-glossy ads which also contained video, or - in the case of one Alfa Romeo ad - the sultry tones of a French model declaring, "Je suis Guillietta!".

Fig 8 - ParisMatch feature story on Dimitri Medvedev - full-page high-quality photo overlaid with creative typography. Dammit - it looks just like a magazine!

Fig. 9 - Lovely type and layout!

Fig. 10 - Great layout, great type, great photographs - and video!

Fig 11 - Great typography again, with precision placing. Note the text precision-wrapped around the huge "J".

Fig 12 - Another gorgeous combination of full-page photo and precision text.

Fig 13 - Front page of the New York Times Editors' Choice.

Fig 14 - Inside page of NYT Editors' Choice showing story layout.

Looking at all these great pages, you'd be forgiven for thinking: "Wow! We're there!" But nothing could be further from the truth...

No iPad "reader" app laid out any of these pages. Every single one is a "picture" of a page. You can't scroll the text - except to the next full "page". Even worse - you can't increase the size of the text if you need to. If the layout folks made the type too small for you to read, then you'd better pick up a magnifying-glass, because no amount of "thumb and index-finger stretching" on your iPad screen will make it any bigger.

Each of these publications is its own iPad app - in effect, an interactive slideshow.

The other problem is that because these pages are graphics, they are totally iPad only. Even if you could view them on another screen, as soon as they're scaled, the text - which of course is really only a "picture of text" and does not use scalable text technology - breaks badly.

Now, I don't mean to be too harsh here. These are beautiful iPad-only magazines, and if the layout folks get the typesize right, they'll do for now. But even if the iPad continues to sell at its current rate, it's still going to be only a fraction of the potential market for onscreen publications of this calibre.

What we really need is an onscreen layout engine capable of creating this level of quality and precision from Web-standards markup.

I'd like to see some of the HTML and CSS gurus who read this blog picking up the challenge of reproducing these pages using only markup. In the process, I think we'd all gain a better understanding of what can be done today, and where markup and layout need to go to truly create the future of reading - not just books, but ALL reading...

The iPad has shown that it can display pretty much anything the designer can create. Now we need the markup to support this level of sophistication, the tools to create it, and the browser-type applications which can parse it.

iPad Blows Kindle Out Of The Water - But Amazon's Kindle App Is Best iPad Reader...

2010-09-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

A tale of two eBooks: A quick side-by-side photo of Kindle and iPad in the same lighting conditions - quite acceptable light for reading a paper book or on the iPad, but a real strain for Kindle reading.

The Bottom Line: Since I got my iPad, I find reading books on it so good that I can no longer bear to use my Kindle - although the Kindle app is the best eBook reader on the iPad, and the only one I use. Picking up the Kindle - after using the iPad for several weeks - is like stepping back into the Dark Ages of eBooks - a small-screen world of poor contrast, in which you can read comfortably only in perfect, bright lighting. It looks somehow pathetic alongside the iPad. You can never go back home again...

Doubts Resolved: My only doubt about the iPad, before using one myself, was whether Apple's text rendering would be good enough at the resolution of the iPad - or whether I would miss ClearType. The answer's unequivocal. The text rendering is great - so much better than Kindle - and I don't miss ClearType at all.

I had always believed that our invention of ClearType was a brilliant Band-Aid for the problem of low-resolution displays, back in 1998, but that it was a technology with an expiration date. At some point, increasing screen resolution would obviate the need for it.

However, I expected that it would take screen resolutions of 150ppi (pixels per inch) or more to make ClearType redundant. Apple's display technology on MacBooks, and now the iPad, at 133ppi, is good enough that it's no longer needed. And that raises a whole raft of issues about the value of future investments in font hinting.

Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead (1861 – 1947), an English mathematician who became a philosopher, once famously said that the entire development of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.

When the history of reading on screens is written, it might well be seen as a series of footnotes to the iPad. Yes, we've had other eBook devices before now. And yes, the Kindle broke new ground with long battery life using the eInk technology. But as I said in an earlier post, eInk is essentially a backward-looking technology, too slavishly bound to emulating paper, and it's an evolutionary dead-end.

The iPad, with a crisp, bright high-resolution screen capable of handling color and video, yet with acceptable battery life, has moved us out of the Dark Ages. It's the first eBook device I've seen that really feels like it's changed the world. I vastly prefer it to paper.

The emergence of the iPad does not necessarily mean that Amazon will lose out. The company which pioneered online book sales did a great job on the Kindle application for the iPad, which is definitely my favorite eBook app - in fact, it's the only one I find myself using. It looks fantastic on my iPad - my "Library" looks like a shelf of "real" books, with high-quality, color covers. And Amazon's Kindle bookstore is far superior to any of the others.

There are still issues which the Kindle app - and all other eBook apps I've seen - need to address if they are to truly match the readability of well-set type on paper. It's all do-able, there's zero rocket science involved. It's simply the case that the companies creating eBook readers have not made the investments required to completely nail the issues. All the readers can certainly be improved. There's work still to be done.

The main problems with the Kindle hardware device are these:

First, the iPad screen makes Kindle look incredibly dated - and cheap. I know, Kindle is a lot cheaper, and eInk is more readable in bright sunlight. But honestly - how much of your reading do you do in bright sun? In any other light conditions, the iPad wins hands-down, with its clear, bright display, which is also capable of displaying great video and animation. At night, reading in bed, there's just no contest. With Kindle, I need a light. With iPad, I can read for hours without disturbing Tanya. And its larger screen also gives more real estate, and feels less cramped than the Kindle. It's worth the difference in cost, by a long way.

Second, the iPad does a lot more than just let you read books. I find myself popping out to the Web to check a fact, or get more information. I use it to play videos, check my email. I even use it as an emergency cellphone (using Skype). Flipboard is an excellent way of checking a few news sites, my Facebook page, etc., all at the same time.

I refuse to pay a data charge of $25 a month or more. So I use only the WiFi connection. I figure that if I need to make an emergency call, I'm always able to find a Starbucks, or a Borders Books...

I've reached the point where I'd be glad to ditch thousands of paper- and hard-backed books from my bookshelves. I'd rather have them all on an iPad. More in future posts.

iPad Reading Leap Marginalizes Kindle Hardware - But Not Kindle Reader...

2010-08-11T06:31:00.000-07:00

Around 20 years ago, I set my personal bar for an onscreen reading experience which would tell me when eBooks had finally surpassed paper books. I would be able to read one of the many books illustrated by Victorian artist Arthur Rackham, on a device which was not only comfortable to use but which did full justice to the detailed, rich illustrations, as well as displaying text which was as comfortable and luxurious to read as a well-printed hardcover edition.

Yesterday, I finally held that dream in my hand - and there was an Apple logo on it. It was a Rackham-illustrated version of Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland, and I was reading it on my iPad...

We have a few early editions of Rackham-illustrated books. But we've been collecting for many years, and today you'd pay several hundred dollars for one in good condition - meaning that millions of people would never be able to experience them until electronic versions were possible.

Alice meets the Dodo : iPad meets the paper book?
(Screen captured from Stanza Reader - also owned by Amazon)

It caused a minor sensation on the Web a few months ago when I suggested - before it had even shipped - that the iPad, with a good color screen and 10-hour battery life, would cause serious problems for Amazon's Kindle and other eInk-based eBook readers.

I haven't blogged much since then. I felt it just wasn't possible to write credibly in a blog entitled "The Future of Reading", without a detailed analysis of the iPad based on extensive reading experience using it.

Having now had the chance to test iPad as a reader on many different types of book, I'm happy to say that this is without question the best reading device I've seen so far. It's good enough that within ten minutes of installing the Kindle Reader software on it, I transferred every single one of the books on my Kindle onto the iPad. Because that's where I'll be doing all my reading from now on.

There's a plethora of good reading software for the Ipad. Apple's own iBook reader is also excellent, as seen in the screen capture below.

"Ah, Piglet! They used to cut down trees like this just so people could read us..."

Don't get me wrong. The iPad's not quite the absolutely perfect device yet. If I had a magic wand, I might make it just a little lighter. And perhaps the battery could run for longer - not that battery life has ever been even remotely a problem so far.

But I'm just being unreasonable. It's an outstanding device, especially considering this is iPad v.1. Because not only is it a great reader, but I watch videos on it, surf the Web, check my email, and listen to music. The backlit screen is so much better for reading in bed. OK, I haven't tried reading on the beach, but I just took it out in the garden in bright sun, and was pleasantly surprised. The level of contrast in sunlight still seems better than the Amazon Kindle in any lighting condition other than perfect. And you can't read a Kindle in bed without a reading light.

Watching what's been happening with Kindle prices over the past few weeks, it seems to me that the iPad may now marginalize the Kindle, instead of killing it outright, because Amazon has been smart enough to see the writing on the eInk and dramatically cut its prices. If you can afford only $140 or so, you might still want to buy a Kindle. But if you can stretch your finances to an iPad, you will - and you should.

The rise of iPad may not be a disaster for Amazon. The Kindle bookstore is great, and My Library of downloaded Kindle books with its attractive, colored covers looks so much better on the iPad than it ever did on the monochrome Kindle screen.

The one misgiving I had before the iPad shipped was how the 133ppi display would handle text without ClearType. And I have to say, the iPad text is terrific. It's a great display. I think we've reached the level of display resolution, combined with better pixel technology from Apple, where we've crossed a boundary. I'll be writing more about this - and many other issues the iPad raises - in future posts on this blog.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with this lovely page of text from a Terry Pratchett novel, captured from the iPod running the Kindle Reader.

This is the device Microsoft - which had at least a ten-year lead over Apple - should have built, but couldn't, stuck as it was between an unwieldy Windows totally unsuitable for this class of device, and a mobile operating system which has been little more than a series of disasters...

New Design

2010-06-21T20:33:00.000-07:00

Some readers of this blog have complained in the past about the white text/black background template I used. So I've changed it. Blogger provided an expanded range of templates, and I like this one. Hope you do too.

One Ocean

2010-06-20T08:37:00.000-07:00

Now you'll realize why the blog's been pretty inactive:) I've been learning to film and edit video.
When the BP Gulf Oil Disaster happened, I wanted to do something to raise people's awareness of what we've been doing to our ocean.

Indian company shows off impressive iPad competitor built with Google's Android OS

2010-02-14T09:54:00.000-08:00

Notion Ink's Adam, an Android-based iPad competitor

I'm indebted to friends in India - and to the Technoholik technology blog of Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan of the Economic Times there, for this sneak preview of what some are already hailing as "The iPad Killer".

It's a classic "David and Goliath" story. Tiny startup, Notion Ink of Hyderabad, enters the ring this week against the Mighty Apple, when it showcases its "Adam" Android-based tablet at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Although when David is using an operating system developed by Google, the odds don't seem quite so sharply stacked against it.

The Technoholik website has lots of pictures of the new device, plus video interviews with the Notion Ink founders. It's an interesting device, which uses the low-power PixelQi color display developed for the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC). The transflective display is said to allow the Adam 16 hours of battery life - and 160 with the backlight turned off.

The Notion Ink founders announced that the device will ship in the USA in June or July, priced between $327 and $800 (there are two screen options: one PixelQi, one LCD...)

The Adam touch screen

There's no question that this is the tablet the geeks will love. Flash support. Integrated videocam. Open operating system. Multi-tasking. Firefox and Chrome browsers. Plenty of them will write applications for this device.

Of course, that's not the market at which Apple is aiming with the iPad. It's unashamedly a consumer device, building on the phenomenal success of the iPhone.

There are two open issues which will decide whether the Adam can really mount a challenge against Apple in this space. The first is User Interface. Apple is unquestionably the master of easy-to-learn, easy-to-use UI. And it has decades of experience. I'd expect Apple to win this one hands-down.

The second is marketing power. Apple has one of the best brands in the business, if not the best. It has a user base which is loyal, bordering on fanatic (with quite a few who crossed that border a long time ago...) And, of course, it has its own chain of hugely-popular Apple stores.

On the other hand, it's pretty obvious that Google will put its weight behind any device using its Android OS, and is bound to go head-to-toe with Apple here as well as in mobile phones.

It's going to be interesting. Competition is great!

I certainly hope Notion Ink has some measure of success. India has some of the smartest programmers on the planet, and it's about time some Indian companies emerged as global players in the device market.

Technoholik's iPad v. Adam spec comparison

Changing How You Comment, To Defeat Spam...

2010-02-08T06:09:00.000-08:00

Over recent months, I've seen a big increase in the number of spam comments submitted to this blog by people selling everything from Viagra to cheap software. I've been catching them during comment monitoring - so you don't see them.

However, it's become a chore to keep weeding them out. So I've added a "word recognition" box to the comments page, which you'll have to fill in before your comment appears in my email Inbox for moderation. That should prevent automated spammers from trying to post.

I apologize for having to add this extra step to your comment process, but it can't be helped. Please keep those comments coming!

iPad: Dodging The "Doonesbury Bullet"...

2010-02-03T17:45:00.000-08:00

Doonesbury cartoons flayed the Newton to death for its (dreadful) handwriting recognition...

Here's a little story I'd like to share on why I believe Apple's iPad will succeed where Microsoft Windows-based TabletPCs have failed to gain more than a tiny niche-market share. I believe it offers a classic illustration of "geek" versus "consumer" thinking...

I happened to be having an online conversation several months ago with a former colleague who had been one of the Handwriting Recognition (HR) experts on the Microsoft TabletPC team. His view was that Apple would have real trouble launching a Tablet device - because Microsoft holds a number of key patents in the area of handwriting recognition, and he could see no way in which they'd be able to get around those to create a usable device.

It's true that Microsoft has indeed done some great work around handwriting recognition. My wife Tanya wrote the first draft of a 400,000-word book using it, on a Windows TabletPC. It wasn't absolutely perfect. But it was perfectly usable. And I'm sure MSFT has a ton of patents around it.

Apple, of course, has been seriously bitten in the past by handwriting recognition - or lack of it. The Newton was launched in 1993, as the first in a new category of device - the Personal Digital Assistant. Theory was, you'd write on the screen with a stylus, Newton would recognize your writing, and turn it into typed text on the screen. Newton might not do a perfect job at first, but it would "learn" your handwriting as it went along, and rapidly improve.

It was a disaster. Newton's recognition mistakes were so legendary that the widely-syndicated Doonesbury cartoon strip poked fun at them for months, at the end of which time Newton was a laughing-stock. It eventually died a well-deserved death.

I bet Steve Jobs vowed at that time that the company would never again ship a device which depended on handwriting recognition for its success. Anyone on the iPad team who suggested putting it in would be given The Glasgow Farewell. (Pick a window - you're leaving!)

Classic. If there's an obstacle, go around.

To the geeks at Microsoft, though, handwriting recognition was one of The Last Great Problems of Computing - a really interesting and complex area. Lots of languages, too! They tackled it head-on.

And, you know what? By applying brute force, effort, huge investment, and some really smart people - they solved it! I've never tried Windows HR with any language other than English - where it does work really well. But I'm sure it does a great job on other languages, too - even Chinese and Japanese.

And you know what else? It won't matter! Because when you pack a tablet device with enough power to run Windows and Office, do handwriting recognition, full-screen video, and everything else, you end up with a machine that is too thick, too heavy, uses too much power, and runs too hot. And it doesn't help that the hardware manufacturers who're building them all get off on a 16:9 aspect ratio video trip at the same time.

You've built a fleet of Hummers, when the market just wants a Prius...

iPad: It's definitely not a Newton...

Steve Jobs knows how to hook consumers. The first Macintoshes had 128K of RAM, and only a 400K floppy disk - no hard drive at all. But they reset people's expectations of what a computer should look like, how easy it should be to use, and what you could do with one. As they got better, people just kept upgrading, with no resentment. Today, Macintosh laptops and desktops are better than Windows machines. You pay more, for sure. But if you can afford it, it's worth it.

The Windows TabletPC philosophy was: "If we can build it, they will come". It's a valid gamble, if you have deep enough pockets. Occasionally, it even comes off.

Apple's philosophy, on the other hand, is: "First, we get them to come. Then we can take them with us." If you create a market with enough customers, they will tell you what they want next. They'll tell you what's missing. You build on a relationship with a LOT of customers. And you make a LOT of money while you're doing it. And oh, by the way - there's a new business model that goes along with it so you make more money AFTER you've sold the device.

I would not be in the least surprised to find that in a few years there's a high-end iPad that is a powerful computer used for many tasks other than media consumption. I've already speculated elsewhere that we might see a stylus for the iPad sooner rather than later. Apple's website says the iPad's touch-recognition capability is high-precision; so a stylus ought to give a lot more precision than a finger for applications like drawing, for example.

Geeks have been complaining since the launch: "It doesn't do multitasking!" "There's no support for Flash!" "It's not an open environment!"

All I have to say is this: It's a Prius, not a Ferrari - yet. And you'll see plenty on the road...

iPad: No egg freckles on its face...

iPad: Apple Upsets The eBook Apple-cart...

2010-01-31T18:53:00.000-08:00

iPad: Will truly upset the Apple-cart...

It's been a while since I posted a blog here. I've been pretty busy with other projects - but that wasn't the reason. At least two blogs I had in draft form for months were based on the rumors filling the Internet and the business press that Apple was about to launch a Tablet device. Like everyone else, I had lots of information that could end up being either true or false - like the story that Apple had taken delivery of a quantity of 9.7-inch displays, which ended up being true. I decided against publishing, because I felt another dose of speculation added nothing.

Here are a few of my pre-launch speculations, though - copied and pasted from draft blogs:

"Apple could easily create a really elegant Tablet which looked just like a larger iPhone. With the iPhone, it already has a keyboardless UI which millions of users have found easy and convenient to use."
"With a Tablet device, Apple could enter both the NetBook and eBook markets at the same time."
"Apple has shown with each of its devices - PC, phone and music player - that there are millions of people who'd happily pay a premium price for a great user experience."
"If Apple can get reasonable battery life from an iPhone-like Tablet, it's going to make the Amazon Kindle screen unacceptable."

Well, as the whole world now knows, Apple did indeed launch a Tablet. It does look like a giant iPhone - even runs the iPhone operating system. It's set its sights on the growing eBook market. And it has succeeded in getting a reported 10-hour battery life from a color screen which also supports video.

Apple's PR department must still have sore hands since the launch, from high-fiving each other. When was the last time the launch of a new computer made the front page of all the major newspapers - with a huge color photograph? (Answer: Never!)

I predict it will be a huge success. It will cause the same kind of mayhem among TabletPC and eBook manufacturers that the iPod and iPhone did in their respective market categories.

It's a great-looking device. It's sleek and elegant - exactly what you'd expect from Apple. But that isn't why it will dominate the Tablet category. It's because Apple understands that computers have made a transition from "computing devices" to "consumer devices". Apple has built its huge success in recent years by becoming a company which creates great end-to-end consumer experiences.

The arrival of the iPad is bad news for the Kindle. Even though I've owned Kindles since the first one shipped, I've always described it as a "transitional device". It was simply the first device with a screen good enough to enable reading text for long periods, with long battery life - and an acceptable book-buying experience built in.

The trouble with the Kindle is that for all its vaunted modernity, it's really a backward-looking device. So is the eInk technology at its heart. Both are aimed at creating an experience close to paper. But that's not the Future of Reading. The future will be created by first equalling, then going beyond, paper. It is books with full color, books with video, books which update through the Web. Kindle was good enough to jump-start the digital book market. But it's not good enough to keep it. eInk was acceptable only until the appearance of a color screen with acceptable battery life. And the iPad's 10 hours is more than enough to knock it off its pedestal...

iPad is also bad news for Microsoft, which has been pushing TabletPCs for years. It pioneered the genre, and my good friend Bert Keely has been at the heart of its efforts.

The trouble is trying to innovate at Microsoft, which is a company of geeks, run by geeks, and dominated by Windows.

When TabletPC began at Microsoft, it was a research effort - outside of the regular Windows organization. Once it was re-organized into Windows, that was the kiss of death. I never really thought much about this while I worked there, but it's my belief that despite all the lip-service paid to end-users, the only Windows customers with any real power are the Windows Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs).

They're the customers Windows really has to care about - because most people get their OS upgrades when they change machines. And the Windows OEMs never seemed to get what TabletPCs should really be about. Most of them shipped machines which were basically conventional laptop PCs with Tablet functionality implemented like an add-on. They all had keyboards, and converted to tablets by swiveling a standard screen.

There were some true keyboard-free tablets in the early days - NEC shipped two models (version 2 shipped in Japan only, though!) They died the death by being ahead of their time, and suffered from poor battery life. So we ended up with TabletPCs like Toshiba's M7, for instance, which were neither one thing nor the other, and wound up being terrible at both. I ran one for more than a year - using it as a conventional laptop because as a Tablet it was just too big, too heavy, too awkward and ran far too hot to be used more than occasionally. Even as a laptop, it suffered from the unreliability all-too-likely in any device whose hardware and software are designed by different companies.

My M7 was replaced by a MacBook Pro, which turned out to be the best Windows laptop I ever had (until I left Microsoft and bought a 133ppi MacBookPro to replace it...) As a result of that experience, my wife Tanya replaced her Windows laptop with an iMac desktop with a large screen and an internal 1Terabyte hard drive. It's wonderful.

I run Mac OSX when I'm doing page layout or working on high-resolution scans using Adobe InDesign, PhotoShop and Lightroom. But I spend most of my time in Windows. So I run Vista using BootCamp. This MacBookPro is the most trouble-free Windows machine I've ever had. I could never get a Windows laptop to Sleep and Wake instantly. Even if it would sleep when brand-new, inevitably the Sleep capability would fail within a few weeks, and I'd be forced to use Hibernate instead. My MacBook Pro still Sleeps and Wakes reliably, months later.

Vista is a great OS - provided you are running it on a fast and powerful machine. I know it's the fashion to dump on it - even inside Microsoft. Hey, it's the old story - blame all of your mistakes on the guy who just left. There's no question that it took waaay too long to build, and that when it first shipped it lacked so many drivers that most people had problems getting their existing equipment to run. I knew plenty of people who had problems running it on Macs using BootCamp back then. But once Apple had released all the drivers the problems went away. I like Vista, and so far I've seen no compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 7.

After a few months, I still find text on MacOSX too blurry for my taste, even on this 133ppi display. ClearType was one of the things we did get right at Microsoft - even if it took ten years to get it into the hands of most customers.

I'm not revealing any confidential information here. Anyone who saw Bill Gates' keynote speech at Comdex in 1998 saw me on stage demonstrating ClearType. And they heard Bill say - in pretty emphatic terms - that it would ship in Windows.

Well, it shipped in Windows XP, right enough. But the Windows team buried it so deeply that most users never even found out it was there, or how to turn it on. It wasn't until Vista that it was turned on by default for all users. And that shipped in 2008. Ten years after we first showed it before we truly got it into the hands of our customers!

Apple implemented its own version. However, they turned it on for everyone the instant they shipped it. It's a pity they took a more simplistic approach, and that's the only question-mark I still have against the iPad.

At Microsoft, we invented ClearType specifically to solve the problems of creating highly-readable text at normal reading sizes (between 9 and 13 point). There's a lot more technology going on than simply utilizing the RGB sub-pixels on LCD displays. Apple's clone creates text whose characters look more like the original print fonts at those sizes than ClearType does - but the price they pay is a lack of sharpness and clarity, and text that's slightly blurred at the edges. That means I still prefer to do all my reading on Windows, with "genuine" ClearType - even on this great 133ppi display.

My only misgiving about the iPad is that its screen is 122ppi. If Apple implements its current ClearType clone on it, we might end up with text that's slightly blurry, and could cause problems reading for sustained periods. That's only speculation, though. I can't say for sure until I've held one in my hands and tried to read on it for several hours.

When the merits of different operating systems are discussed, people - especially at Microsoft - have always trotted out a standard argument: "It's much easier for Apple, they have control over both the hardware and the operating system, they don't have the same number of different processors/screens/mice/devices to support".

That argument was logical enough when comparing Macintoshes running MacOS with Windows PCs. But my BootCamp experiences led me to ask the question - publicly, in this blog: "How can Apple make a better Windows machine than any Windows PC maker?" (That turned out not to be such a good career move for me at Microsoft. Take my tip - never tell the Emperor he's butt-naked, unless you're sure he's big enough to see it as an opportunity to buy new clothes).

If you install Vista on a Mac using BootCamp, and run the Windows Experience Index diagnostics which rate its capabilities, you end up with better scores than the vast majority of Windows machines. This machine rates a WEI of 5.3 - and I've never seen a score higher than that.

Apple's had its failures in the handheld device area before, of course - anyone say Newton? But in my opinion they're a long way past that, and haven't put a foot wrong in years.

Newton's "Achilles' Heel" was that reliable Handwriting Recognition was critical to its functionality, and we all know what a Doonesbury Disaster that turned out to be! iPhone was built without that dependency, and thus dodges the "Doonesbury Bullet".

Even in these tough economic times, Apple has proved there are plenty of people who'll pay a premium for a great device. It has been creating winners for years now. There were plenty of cheaper MP3 music players available long before Apple's iPod appeared. Yet the iPod owns the market - even though it was both later to market, and more expensive. Checking out eBay recently, there were only 3 used iPods for sale (and over 1000 Zunes...)

iPod, therefore I am...

There are plenty of mobile phones around. But Apple's much more expensive iPhones (both the phone and the service) have been flying off the shelves. I've had a Windows Mobile phone for years. But compared to the iPhone it's a complex, fussy, unfriendly brick. I had been meaning to get rid of it for a long time, but I don't use a mobile phone that much, and I still read books on it using Microsoft Reader, so I've been hesitant about making the switch.

However, last week I dropped my Windows Mobile phone in the water. It was DOA when brought back to the surface. So now I need a new phone. No way am I buying a Windows Mobile replacement. I really grew to hate that phone. I've checked out the new Google phones, and I don't like them much either. No, I want a great customer experience - so I'll go with Apple.

iPhone: Now I have an excuse to buy one...

I'm not an Apple Fanboy. But you have to give credit where it's due. From being browbeaten into a mere 2-3% PC market share several years ago, Apple has parlayed its expertise in "consumer computing" into astounding success. I expect the iPad to continue that success.

Digital Independence Takes A Step Closer...

2009-10-19T07:05:00.000-07:00

In 2007, it became clear to me that access to technology - especially computers and Internet connectivity - is critical to the future of reading.

There's no question now that if reading does have a future - and it must - then that future is digital. We spent 550 years since Gutenberg developing a complex ecosystem in which people wrote content, which was then turned into dirty marks on shredded trees and distributed to the people who read it.

It's hard to realize that, against this 550 years of history, the Internet went mainstream only about 15 years ago. So we're really only at the very beginning of creating a new ecosystem which will replace the "Gutenberg" ecosystem.

That's why we're having all the thrash, controversy, legal action etc. around Intellectual Property, patents and so on. We forget it took developments like the international signing of the Berne Convention (spearheaded by French author Victor Hugo - which I wrote about in an earlier post) before authors' and publishers' rights were truly recognized and protected.

One of the key issues moving forward is: If digital technology is truly to replace paper, then how do we make sure that everyone has access to it?

We're going through changes on a historic and global scale. I felt we needed a beacon to illuminate a long-term goal to which we could all aspire. And that was why in 2007 I wrote the Digital Declaration of Independence which always appears at the head of every post on this blog:

We hold this truth to be self-evident: That every human has an equal and unalienable right to the means to create, distribute and consume information to realize their full potential for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness - regardless of the country they live in, their gender, beliefs, racial origin, language or any impairments they may have.

I took as my model the US Declaration of Independence. It wasn't a goal which would be reached in just a few years, but was truly long-term. After all, the 1776 Declaration stated that all men (!) were created free and equal, with certain inalienable rights. But it took more than 200 years before the United States could elect a black President, and it could take a while yet before we see a woman President (unless Sarah Palin performs a miracle - in which case I'm heading back to Europe :-))

Although it is a long-term goal, there are at least some signs that some governments are beginning to realize the importance of universal high-speed access to the Internet.

CNN reported last month that Finland became the first country in the world to declare broadband Internet access a legal right. The move by Finland is aimed at bringing Web access to rural areas, where access has been limited.

According to CNN:

"Starting in July, telecommunication companies in the northern European nation will be required to provide all 5.2 million citizens with Internet connection that runs at speeds of at least 1 megabit per second.

The one-megabit mandate, however, is simply an intermediary step, said Laura Vilkkonen, the legislative counselor for the Ministry of Transport and Communications.

The country is aiming for speeds that are 100 times faster -- 100 megabit per second -- for all by 2015.

"We think it's something you cannot live without in modern society. Like banking services or water or electricity, you need Internet connection," Vilkkonen said.

"Universal service is every citizen's subjective right," Vilkkonen said.

CNN reported that the United Nations is making a big push to deem Internet access a human right, and in June, France's highest court declared such access a human right. But Finland goes a step further by legally mandating speed.

The news network also pointed out that the United States is the only industrialized nation without a national policy to promote high-speed broadband, according to a study released in August by the Communications Workers of America, the country's largest media union.

Forty-six percent of rural households do not subscribe to broadband, and usage varies based on income, the study found.

In February, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is expected to submit a national plan to Congress. The FCC says that expanding service will require subsidies and investment of as much as $350 billion -- much higher than the $7.2 billion President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package has set aside for the task.

There's a long way to go. But at least there are the first signs of movement towards the digital future...

What Does Amazon Have Against Europe? Or Is Kindle Just A Digital Stalking-Horse?

2009-09-11T17:19:00.000-07:00

...but not in Europe!

There's something strange going on with Amazon's Kindle eBook Reader - and also with the Kindle app for Apple's iPhone...

It's going on for two years now since Amazon first launched the Kindle and really cranked up the interest in eBooks. It was understandable that Amazon should launch the device first in the USA only, to gauge interest and see whether there really was a market.

It was a little strange that Kindle didn't also launch in the UK at the same time. As a Brit, I'm well aware that British English and US English are not quite the same - but they're near enough as makes no difference once you've made it past color/colour, neighbor/neighbour and so on. I mean, there are really no barriers to Brits reading books formatted in US English - so why not take advantage of a second ready-made market?

Amazon UK won't sell you a Kindle, though. And it doesn't sell Kindle books either. My FB friend Iain Rae Lennox, who lives in Glasgow, has been desperate to get his hands on one ever since they shipped.

Iain's an Apple iPhone user. Apple sells its wildly-popular phone in Europe, of course. So he was overjoyed when the new Kindle app was announced. He'd be able to use his iPhone as an eBook reader - or so he thought.

Trouble is, Apple's iPhone app store in the UK doesn't sell the Kindle reader. And he still can't buy Kindle books in Britain.

So what's going on? I'm sure Amazon wouldn't tell me if I asked. But perhaps one of the better-known tech journalists will pick this up.

But here's my theory. Copyright enforcement is much more rigidly enforced in Europe than in the USA. Google has hit this problem with its book digitization, and it's clear that Europe will not roll over and accept what Google's done here in the USA - even if the US courts eventually do.

I think Amazon sees the whole eBook copyright issue in Europe as a can of worms it really doesn't want to open right now.

As Steve Jobs pointed out earlier this week, Amazon's not sharing its Kindle sales figures - although I do recall seeing figures on the increasing proportion of Amazon's overall book sales going to the Kindle.

Could it be that Amazon doesn't really care about the success or failure of the Kindle device itself, and that's its only a stalking-horse to ramp up the number of digital book titles out there? I'm sure that's where Amazon makes its money - not on the Kindle hardware. If I'm any yardstick, I've already spent twice as much money on books as I spent on the device (at least as I would have spent if I hadn't drowned one and lost one :-()

If there were lots of eBook readers out there, and they all read Amazon's Kindle format, would Amazon care? I don't think so.

Anyway, I'll be watching Europe closely to see when the Kindle and the iPhone app actually make it into the hands of customers...

En France? Mais Non!

Homo Africanus: Time To Admit That We're ALL Africans?

2009-08-30T12:56:00.000-07:00

In the course of all the research I have done into "Reading", it became obvious that "Reading and Writing" were "learned activities" which were built on top of the human visual perception system, and especially the way it works in the environment in which it developed - the wild.

Over the past few decades, researchers have answered the mysteries of where the human race came from, and how we managed to spread across the entire globe. Interestingly, geneticists such as Spencer Wells and others have used DNA tracing to confirm earlier theories.

Humans came out of Africa only about 160,000 years ago, and spread across the face of the world in the manner shown in the map at the top of this post. DNA tracing has confirmed the "branching" shown in the map (for more detail, read Wells' excellent book The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey).

With our typical human arrogance, when we first began to research human origins we called ourselves Homo sapiens, or Wise Men, to distinguish modern man from ancestors such as Homo erectus (Upright Man), whom we replaced.

Human history has shown that we're really not that wise at all.

We all originated in Africa, but just as soon as different branches of humans began to develop external differences in response to their new environments (dark skin turning pale in colder climates to ensure we could absorb enough Vitamin D from the weaker sunlight, for instance), we began to seize on these as "racial differences", and use them as excuses for conquest, conflict and persecution.

We began to view those with a different "environmental adaptations" to our own as inferior. Later, we added cultural and religious criteria to our categories of discrimination.

It's a human tendency which has been well exploited by power-seekers, and the process is seen at its starkest in the genocidal measures instigated by Nazi Germany in the years leading up to and including the Second World War.

First, begin a campaign to stir up feelings against an identifiable group with visible "racial differences" (Jews, most notably). Gradually step up the racist hate campaign until you can get your target audience to accept the notion that a particular racial group is somehow "sub-human". Once you have done that, you can treat them in the same horrible ways you treat animals. (a whole other topic...)

From that point on, as the Nazis proved, genocide is a simple matter of logistics - IBM punch cards, brutal "herders", railway timetables, and mercilessly efficient slaughterhouses for humans.

It's easy to point the finger at Nazi Germany. But the British settlers who landed on the island of Tasmania off Australia in the 18th Century were no better; they embarked on a successful campaign to exterminate the native Tasmanians, who were still living in the Stone Age (called The Black Wars).

The "we're superior - they're inferior!" rationale was used to build the British Empire, by Japan to enslave Korea and Manchuria, and so on - the list of examples is both exhaustive and depressing, down through the millenia and including both Ancient Greece and (especially )Rome.

The lamentable history of black slavery and discrimination in many different parts of the world (including the USA, of course) is another stark example.

Racial discrimination is still going on in many parts of the world today.

I know this is a simplistic step - and it can't possibly make racism and racism persecution go away by itself - but don't you think it would be at least making a start to get rid of the term, Homo sapiens, and replace it with Homo Africanus?

Web Typography Takes A Big Step Forward With Stéphane Curzi's Baseline

2009-08-30T03:52:00.000-07:00

Stéphane Curzi's Baseline website

The noise-to-signal ratio on FaceBook is pretty high, but it's worth keeping up. Once in a while a real gem arrives, something you might otherwise have missed.

Earlier this week, Jackie Goldberg in LA shared a link to a project by Montreal-based designer Stéphane Curzi using baseline text alignment on the Web.

It's very impressive. This is the nicest-looking typography I've seen on the Web using HTML and CSS, because it has the consistency only an underlying grid can provide. Most websites you see - even if the designer has tried to take pains with the typography - somehow still end up looking as if they're missing something. What's missing is typographic harmony, which can be achieved only by integrating all the type on the page - headings, captions, body text, etc. - using matching grid units.

Take a look at the page below. Notice how stable and harmonious it seems (look at the website to get the true picture).

The underlying grid creates harmony. Baselines are aligned between columns, and headings are harmonically spaced from the text.

Stéphane has created a download on his site so you can go and get all the CSS, Javascript etc. and start experimenting for yourself. I'm looking forward to seeing what others can do by building on top of this great work. There are both PC and MacOSX versions, and the code will work with most browsers (but not IE6).

So far, it doesn't work with the CSS3 multicolumn attributes. But I'm hoping someone can figure this out. Stéphane's made his work free under Creative Commons. All you have to do is give him a credit.

It ought to work with any font, just by editing the CSS.

Exciting!

Lesson Learned: Don't Publish Comments You Can't Understand...

2009-08-23T04:31:00.000-07:00

I can't understand what you're saying...
Photo copyright Tanya Hill, 2009

I've been pretty inactive on this blog for a couple of weeks, since I've been back in Washington State taking care of some business. When my wife Tanya and I flew in, we brought just one laptop with us - my trusty MacBook Pro.

Tanya - who's a prolific photographer as well as an artist - has been putting in long hours learning and using Adobe Lightroom 2, after I downloaded trial versions of both it and Apple's Aperture photo software. Lightroom won the initial evaluation hands-down, and we'll buy a copy when the "30-day free evaluation period" runs out. I'll write more about that in a later post.

Anyway, that means I haven't had much free computer time to write new posts. So I've contented myself with reading mail and news a couple of times a day, and monitoring blog comments.

I suppose I should have known better. When a Japanese-language comment came in, I merely scanned the first mail notification and Published it. However, when a second Japanese comment came in a day or two later, I began to get wary. How did I know what these comments said?

So I ran the first one through Google translator. I've seen lots of "Google translator howlers" on the Web, so I wasn't disappointed when the translation yielded English which was unintelligible.

However, it's a fairly safe bet that any comment containing the phrase "I am a runaway girl" probably doesn't have much to do with The Future of Reading :-)

So I deleted the comment. The second one also made no sense in Google translation, but was clearly about potential commercial relationships involving women, businessmen and hotels. So I deleted it without publishing it.

Conclusion: There's a new kind of spammer in town, and I need a new rule. "If you can't read it, don't publish it...

Back-Door Censorship And Dirty Tricks On YouTube...

2009-08-01T15:58:00.000-07:00

O'Reilly on Fox News: Claims Amsterdam, Holland is a cesspool of crime and corruption, and an example of how liberal policies don't work...

Interesting goings-on on FaceBook and Youtube today, which demonstrate that censorship and dirty tricks are alive and well in US politics - and so-called "news"...

Earlier this week I received a message from my FaceBook friend Thomas Milo, a recognized world expert in Arabic typesetting. Thomas was passing on a link to a video on YouTube ,which gave some interesting statistics about Amsterdam as a rebuttal to a recent segment by Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly.

O'Reilly - who is not one of nature's liberals - was joined on the segment by a couple of women "experts" who looked like The Stepford Wives. All three claimed that liberal policies had turned Amsterdam into a cesspit of drugs, gangs, crime and corruption.

Didn't sound much like the Amsterdam I knew. I traveled on software business to just about every European capital in the late 1980s and 1990s. Amsterdam had seemed like a peaceful, relaxed place. You could walk the streets at night without fear. Had things changed that much in ten or fifteen years?

Well, no, according to the rebuttal, which was a completely innocuous video showing people walking round Amsterdam, or traveling the city's canals on barges. It's combined with some interesting statistics which show how much worse crime and the drug problem are in the USA than Holland. The whole thing is so innocent you'd happily let your two-year-old watch it...

Official government statistics seem to show that the USA has a stronger claim to the title of "drug- and crime-ridden cesspit" than Holland.

What's really interesting, though, is what happened next...

The first time I visited the Youtube link, the video played with no problems. It was pleasant, factual and convincing. Then Thomas posted another FaceBook comment, claiming that it had been "sabotaged". Huh?

I went back for another look. This time, Youtube had put up an advisory notice that "this video contained material that might not be suitable for under-18s". To watch it, I had to sign in to my YouTube account and verify my age.

"This video or group may contain content that is inappropriate for some users..."

What's especially interesting about all this is that the original O'Reilly segment, also on Youtube - and containing words like "brothel", in my judgement more "inappropriate for some users" than any of the language in the rebuttal - did NOT require you to sign in.

That's the trouble with the kind of "user community self-censorship" that's used on sites like Youtube: it's wide open to abuse, since any content can be anonymously flagged by any user, and thus easily and effectively handicapped.

I have no political axe to grind here. I'm neither a liberal, nor a conservative. I tend to make up my mind on individual issues rather than taking any polarized stance. What scares me is that it's so easy for any unscrupulous user or group of users to behave like the Thought Police, and use flagging as a political or propaganda weapon. You have to be pretty insecure in your beliefs if you can't allow dissent. Or else you believe you're fighting a "just and holy war" for the hearts and minds of US TV viewers, in which The End Justifies The Means (and we've heard that one before...).

Where would you rather walk in the street at night - Amsterdam, or New York?

It will be fascinating to watch what happens next. I logged into Youtube - along with many others - and posted a protest about what appears to be cynical and malicious manipulation of the "group self-censorship" mechanism.

Remains to be seen whether Youtube, or its parent, Google, can or will do anything about it. At the very least, maybe someone should go in and flag O'Reilly content as "inappropriate for users with a mental age greater than seven"...

Oops!

Les Misérables: Would Victor Hugo Applaud Huge Music Download Fines?

2009-07-31T18:28:00.000-07:00

Portrait of "Cosette" by Emile Bayard, from the original edition of Les Misérables (1862). The author, Victor Hugo, was the instigator of the Berne Convention, which established international copyright to protect writers and artists.

OK, this post is bound to be controversial. I will absolutely publish any opposing points of view, provided they're civil. However, I get to moderate the comments, and won't publish any that overstep the bounds of civilized argument.

This week we heard that a Boston graduate student, Joel Tenenbaum, will probably have to declare bankruptcy after a jury awarded the music industry $645,000 in damages because he had "willfully violated the copyright" on 30 downloaded songs. The court heard that the 30 songs were only the ones on which the music industry (which brought the case) focused, but Tenenbaum admitted on the witness stand that he had downloaded and shared more than 800 songs between 1999 and 2007.

Last month, a federal jury in Minneapolis ruled that Jammie Thomas-Rasset must pay $1.92 million, or $80,000 on each of 24 songs, after a similar conclusion.

Associated Press, which reported the case, said the music industry typically offered to settle such cases for about $5,000, though it has said that it stopped filing such lawsuits last August, and is instead working with Internet service providers to fight the worst offenders. Cases already filed, however, were proceeding to trial.

The jury awards are draconian, no question. And you have to feel sympathy for those singled out for prosecution. But I'm not sure the music industry had much choice here. Presumably they made an offer to settle, which was refused. At which point, there's no alternative but to bring a case to trial - otherwise you might as well tell every defendant just to refuse to settle...

Once the accused makes the decision to put the matter into the hands of a jury, it's a crapshoot - as anyone who has watched some of the more outrageous examples of damages awarded in US cases can see.

The music industry's often painted as a collection of "fat cat evil megacorporations oppressing the innocent". However, it was not the music industry which instituted international copyright law. The Berne Convention was adopted in 1886, at the instigation of French author Victor Hugo - to protect creative people. (As of December 2008, there were 164 countries which were parties to the agreement.)

Unfortunately, the ease with which digital data can be copied has spawned a generation which thinks everything is free - or ought to be. A type designer friend of mine has referred to this generation as Generation P (for Parasite). That's a bit unfair; digital theft is not committed only by the young...

In my view, it's not enough to work only with the Internet service providers to tackle this issue.

I'm all for the democratization of content creation and distribution which the Internet has brought about. Now anyone can be an author, a musician, a film-maker, a type designer, an artist. All the old barriers to entry - equipment, distribution chains, etc - are now irrelevant. But some people are better at it than others, and some want to make it their career. They ought to be able to make a living - a good living, or a very good living indeed - if they are talented enough.

So I support bringing cases of copyright infringement. All computer users need to learn that stealing a set of digital bits that contain the work of someone else is still stealing from the creator of the work, whether those bits represent music, video, a book or a typeface design. And theft should carry a cost.

"Pour encourager les autres", as another Frenchman - Voltaire - said in Candide.

I wonder what Victor Hugo - whose novel, Les Misérables, highlighted the lives of the French urban poor, would have made of it all...

Why Creating A New Word For Reading On Screen Is A Terrible Idea...

2009-07-21T09:28:00.000-07:00

Multi-column layout: better than a poke in the eye with a sharp pixel...

Dan Bloom is a journalist who currently lives in Taiwan. Over the past few days, he's generated a flurry of activity on this blog, my Inbox and on FaceBook, with a suggestion that we need to create a new term to describe the activity of reading onscreen. He suggests the term "screening". (See the comments on my previous post: Paper Dies - But Reading Lives: The Richness of Future Web Reading )

Dan was also very enthusiastic about the multi-column layouts I've been experimenting with on my website, and wants to know if there are free templates anywhere he can use, for example so he could read his email in multi-column.

He asked for my opinion on the term "screening". So here it is:

Creating a new term for reading onscreen is not only unneccessary, but actually counter-productive.

However, Dan's heart is clearly in the right place, so rather than just respond with another in a string of comments, I decided to escalate the topic and make it the subject of this post. (It's my party, and I'll blog if I want to...)

First, the term "screening". IMO, that's like admitting defeat - that somehow "reading on screen" is different to "reading on paper". It's not. Yes, there are differences today. Reading on screen is not as comfortable as reading from paper. But it can - and should - be. Once it is, then all the advantages of digital information really start to pay off.

Imagine a conversation between two people, fifty years from now...

"How did they communicate information back in the old days?"

"Well, they'd plant trees. After 30 or 40 years of growth, they'd cut them down and transport them in hydrocarbon-burning vehicles to a place called a pulp mill. There, they'd mash them up with a load of chemicals (when they were done with the chemicals, they'd dump them in the nearest river).

"Then they'd roll and press the pulp into long sheets of "paper". They'd transport those (again, in hydrocarbon-burning vehicles) to a printing works, where they'd use huge machines to put dirty marks on the "paper", fold it, cut it up, and transport it (more trucks) to the readers, or "bookshops" where people would go to buy the information they wanted or needed."

Anyone really believe we'll still be doing that, 50 years from now? For any kind of information?

In the early days of automobiles, they were noisy, smelly and unreliable. In some parts of the world, you weren't allowed to drive one on the road without a man carrying a red flag walking in front of you as a warning to other road users.

People said the automobile would never replace the horse as the primary means of transport...

As far as reading onscreen is concerned, it's still the early days. It took about 400 years from Gutenberg to the Linotype machine. We've been doing onscreen reading for about 25 years - and it's only been even halfway bearable for about 10.

We don't need the man with the red flag any more, but the automobile is still noisy, unreliable - and stinks.

There's no reason it should be that way. All the technology we need to make reading great on a screen already exists, and could be implemented within a year or two. But the technology companies who make Web browsers, and the people who create Web content, have decided that fighting battles over market share based on "features check lists" is more important than stepping up and implementing a comprehensive plan to make real improvements for everyone who reads on the Web.

Technology companies don't "get" the importance of fixing reading on screen. Journalists do. That's why I'm really happy to see someone like Dan stirring up the waters here.

Journalists should be giving technology and media companies a hard time, along the following lines...

Reading and writing are still the primary means of human communication (because text is easiest to create).
Reading and writing are moving from "making and viewing dirty marks on shredded trees" to "making and viewing digital information".
Reading onscreen is still inferior to reading from paper.
What's your plan to make reading onscreen just as good?
What's your schedule for implementing that plan?

I'd like to see the answers they give.

Now, on the subject of templates for multicolumn layout. The short answer is: I don't have any, although you're welcome to use any of the HTML and CSS markup from my website.

But at the risk of repeating myself yet again:

Multicolumn layout is much more suited to the screen than single-column (because of the way human vision works)
However, it can't work without Pagination (who wants to scroll down to the bottom of one column, then have to scroll a long way up to the top of the next?)
There are many different sizes and shapes of screen. Information has to be paginated "on the fly" for each device
This requires adaptive layout. It's not rocket science - you can see it at work today in applications like the New York Times Reader. But no-one's doing it on the Web yet, although it's easily possible.

Fixing reading on screen is vitally important for the human race. You can instantly create the Library of Congress in a village in West Africa. Digital information can be easily translated into minority languages. Books will cost less. Information can be kept up to date. And so on, and so on.

I happen to believe that the first Web browser to do this properly will leave all the others sitting in the dust, wondering just where their market share disappeared to.

I see plenty of "features lists" from the browsers. What I don't see is strategic, long-term vision.

Paper Dies - But Reading Lives: The Richness of Future Web Reading

2009-07-07T16:28:00.000-07:00

Title page from the 1543 edition of Vesalius' De Humani Corporus Fabrica

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed it's been pretty quiet for the past few days...

On the other hand, the more alert among you will have noticed that "The Book I'm Reading Now" at the top of the blog was Elizabeth Eisenstein's groundbreaking work, "The Printing Press As An Agent Of Change". It's a magnificent analysis. But it's a huge reading task - well over 700 pages, very dense. It's not a casual read; you do have to work at it.

I first read it about ten years ago, while I was doing the intensive research work for The Magic of Reading, but it seemed like a good idea to read it again. The first time, I was more concerned about reading issues per se, but this time it struck me that I'd watched ten years of Internet development since then - and taken part in eBook, eMagazine, eNewspaper and Web development myself.

This is why I like to read books more than once. The book you read is never exactly the same as the author wrote. Because the "real" book goes on inside your head, you always bring your own life experiences, perceptions and state of mind to it. And those are constantly changing - which means you never read the same book twice.

It's also a good reason to ignore the critics' view of any book, movie, piece of music or art. Their background is very different to mine - or yours...

There was another good reason for re-reading Eisenstein. A recent blog post by Clay Shirky talked about "thinking the unthinkable", predicting that the death of newspapers is now certain, although no-one yet knows what will replace them. Shirky referred to Eisenstein, pointing out that the first result of Gutenberg's technology was a fair amount of chaos, and no-one could have predicted exactly how things would turn out.

Well, it was very interesting. I found myself reading Eisenstein in a very different and much richer way than before. Here's an example. One of the most influential early printed books was Vesalius' De Humani Corporus Fabrica, a textbook on human anatomy.

I kept coming across references to it in the text. So much so that I really wanted to take a look at it for myself. In pre-Web days, that would have been a task. But I found a link to a beautiful Flash-based version created by Northwestern University in Illinois, complete with a high-resolution picture of the title page - a great piece of art in itself. Check out the pickpocket being caught in the act in the bottom right of the picture - and the coat-of-arms with the three weasels (Vesalius' hometown was Wesel in Germany). Jokes that still work after almost five centuries...

When I came across references to logarithms - invented by John Napier, a fellow-Scot (but with a better grasp of mathematics than me) - I could go on to Wikipedia and find out more.

John Napier (1550-1617)

I kept doing the same thing, over and over again. Come across a reference, put down the book, go to my computer, do a Web search (I do like Bing, BTW, that's become my default search engine), find some good links, spend some time exploring them. I could sometimes spend an hour or more on the background reading before going back to the book.

In other words, my printed book became an interactive multimedia experience which was far bigger and richer than the original. It took me a lot longer to read - but it made the book come to life, and I learned a lot more.

This raises some interesting questions. For instance, I would have liked to have had Eisenstein as an eBook on my Kindle. It's such a heavy, awkward monster to handle - especially when reading in bed.

However, on Kindle as it is today, that would have made for a much poorer experience - no Web browsing for links... And I'd have hated to see the mess that Kindle's small screen and poor graphics would have made of the title page of De Fabrica...

I would have liked both: A Kindle version of Eisenstein for portable reading, AND my great MacBook Pro laptop (running Vista) for Web searching and references.

I came across a blog post the other day by someone who had recently read Eisenstein and said it didn't really get interesting until after the first couple of hundred pages.

He must have been reading with his eyes (or mind) closed. Here was this woman, Elizabeth Eisenstein, single-handedly taking on most of the Renaissance historians, art historians, theological historians etc. of the past couple of hundred years - and eviscerating them. I kept seeing pictures of Joan of Arc in my mind (almost the right period). This is one brave, tough lady, who by herself changed the perception of the impact of printing on the world.

As I said, don't expect an easy ride - it's hard work. But if you stick with it, hopefully like me you'll end up awestruck. Read the combined volumes 1 and 2 - it's available (but a pricey $61.20) on Amazon in my Recommended Books widget.

BTW, for the past couple of months I've been running FireFox as my default browser. Since I run it on Windows, I get ClearType. And it really is very good. I prefer it to Internet Explorer for one main reason - I can "skin" Firefox so the browser chrome is less intrusive on the eyes. I'm using Anycolor, and the dark gray menus, address bar etc are a lot better. Someone also quietly fixed the bug I complained about a few weeks ago. When you put FF into FullScreen view, the bottom of the screen used to leave uncleaned garbage pixels at the bottom - some kind of repaint bug. Anyway, it's gone now, and FF behaves really well going into and out of FullScreen.

Internet Explorer's a great browser. But it seems to me that the team I left really has its work cut out if they intend to recover lost market share. If I was a FireFox user, I could see no good reason to switch back to IE - especially if I'd installed Firefox 3.5. And it seems readers of this blog are voting with their feet in much that way - 48.1% of them are Firefox users, with IE users totalling 26.96%. If those figures start to be repeated across the Web, then IE is in deep trouble...

Web Advertising: Still Annoying Readers, Still Failing To Replace Print Revenue...

2009-06-24T16:40:00.000-07:00

Three of the "dancing idiots" class of Web ad. There's no reason for animation, other than to attract your attention and distract you from whatever else you're doing. (Of course that's why they do it).

Tanya was busy doing a Web search for the word "frigate", in connection with a section on frigate birds she's writing for her book, when she said: "Look at this flashing advert! Haven't advertisers learned yet that people hate them?"

"What's your reaction to that kind of thing?" I asked.

"Oh, I would deliberately never buy anything from an advert that either flashes on my screen, or expands to cover the text I'm reading," she replied. "I resent the way they distract you."

A few minutes later, a former colleague sent me a link to an article about the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, in which Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive, claimed that the global advertising economy had been permanently "reset" at a lower level, warning that media companies should not plan for revenues to bounce back to pre-recession levels.

Ballmer argued that traditional broadcast and print media would have to plan business models around a smaller share of the advertising market, as revenues continue to move to digital outlets.

Two apparently unrelated pieces of data. But I believe they are connected.

Print advertising is definitely contracting, and online advertising is rapidly growing. But for "traditional" media companies, their online revenue is not growing fast enough to replace what they're losing.

I know a little bit about newspaper advertising, since I was a newspaperman for many years, and I believe the "ad mix" is a large part of the problem.

The most lucrative advertising for both newspapers and magazines, believe it or not, used to be "classified" advertising - "small ads" by people who wanted to sell or buy stuff, find a partner, rent an apartment and so on.

Trouble is that eBay and Craigslist have already cornered that market online. And they do a better job. For instance, a friend of my son's who lives near Seattle just bought a speaker cabinet for a 1970s bass amplifier. He found it on Craigslist - in Portland. Portland's close enough to Seattle to drive down - but you'd never have found that ad in a local Seattle newspaper.

The second most lucrative class of advertising in newspapers was "display advertising" - full- and half-page ads, for example. These were typically very professionally produced, and usually interesting to look at. In many glossy magazines, people read the ads just as much as the content - Vogue magazine would be a good example.

This is a whole class of advertising that hasn't yet made it onto the Web - because it depends on properly paginated content (adaptive, of course - your page will almost certainly be different to my page...)

Web technology today doesn't yet support ads you really want to view. So advertisers resort to animation to draw your eyes. In other words, we have to put up with the "dancing idiots"...

It's not just the content pages which need to become adaptive, of course - the ads themselves have to adapt; bringing in or leaving out content depending on the size of the "page" and the space they have to fill.

Sound too complex? It's already been done. Those who signed up for the Microsoft WPF-based version of the New York Times Reader (the first one, now supplanted by an Adobe AIR version), saw a set of adverts which did exactly that.

I believe the company which gets this technology onto the Web and uses it to create "ads you want to view" will become the "next Google". Unless, of course, it is Google...

My feedback - your animated ad is annoying and I will never respond to it...

White-Water Adventures With The Grandfather Of Type... (from the Bill Hill Archives)

2009-06-21T17:57:00.001-07:00

Robert Norton, The Grandfather of Type, with typical mischievous smile
(photo © Gerald Giampa)

My first encounter with Robert Norton was surreal. It was 1994, and I was working in Edinburgh, Scotland, for Aldus Europe Limited - the European subsidiary of Seattle-based Aldus Corporation, which I'd helped get started back in 1986.

I came back into the office after a few days' vacation, and there were three voicemail messages for me - all identical. A plummy English voice said, "This is Robert Norton at Microsoft. We have a job we think you should be doing. Can you give us a call, please?"

I called Robert, and he explained that Microsoft needed someone to run its Typography group in Redmond, Washington, in which he worked. Was I interested, and could I come over for interviews? He met me for dinner the night before my infamous two-day Microsoft interview loop...

Robert was much larger than life. He was one of the key people behind Microsoft's Windows 3.1 core fonts, which established a new standard in on-screen readability of text when they were revealed to the world in 1991.

To cut a long story short, I got the job - and became Robert's "manager" (a non sequiteur, if ever there was). It was a job which was mostly admirer, but also equal parts cat-herder, elephant-wrangler, incredulous spectator, and occasionally terrified participant...

Robert was almost certainly Microsoft's oldest employee at the time - a huge man, with a mischievous sense of humor and an adventurous spirit undimmed by age. He'd sailed from London to Jamaica, and I heard he had broken his ankle hang-gliding at the age of 67.

When he was poking fun at me - and because I knew he'd always take the bait - I used to call him The Grandfather of Type (anyone less like a staid old grandfather would be hard to imagine).

The only clue that he was not always in the best of health would be that he'd turn up for work in the morning still wearing a hospital identity band, having gone to the emergency room where he'd spent the night hooked up to a drip and an ECG machine.

Lunch with Robert was an adventure. He'd insist on driving. You'd buckle up, check the belt was as tight as possible, and close your eyes. On one occasion, we were planning to have lunch at a Thai restaurant in Redmond. Robert drove, in his white Range Rover. But he missed his turn, and found himself on the wrong side of a railroad track and a belt of landscaping. I often wonder what the landscapers thought of the two-foot-deep ruts that ran for a hundred yards until they petered out at the edge of the tracks (which we bounced over). A 4x4 in Robert's hands was more a Free-Range Rover...

Robert sharing a joke with Matthew Carter

Robert knew we'd bought a beautiful piece of land on the Tolt River, not far from Redmond."I'd love to come up and see it. I'll bring my canoe". I should have known better. I'd heard rumors...

Robert duly arrived, with a huge three-man canoe he'd bought in some garage sale, lashed to the roof of a minivan.

Our house sits a couple of hundred yards from the river. But the path leading to it goes down a winding, uneven, steeply-sloping and muddy former logging trail which is undrivable. Robert and I managed to manhandle his huge canoe down to the water. It was April or May, the river was still cold with snow-melt, but on our property it was divided by an island. Most of the flow went the other side; our side was not very deep - four or five feet at most, with a fairly gentle current.

Robert and I and my son Eldon - who was perhaps six years old at the time - paddled around for a while until we'd exhausted the limited pleasures of that 400-yard stretch of river.

"I don't fancy trying to haul the canoe back up the hill," said Robert. "Why don't you and I paddle it down to the bridge at Carnation (about two miles away), and Tanya can meet us there in the car?"

No-one had ever told me details about Robert's adventures. (I think the game was to provide Robert with fresh victims first, then tell them afterwards - you got better stories that way). I assumed that a man who'd sailed a yacht from London to Jamaica knew what he was doing in a canoe. But something made me hand my wallet, car keys and all the other contents of my pockets to Tanya before we set off...

The first stretch wasn't too bad, except for the branch sticking out of the log-jam, which nearly swept us both into the water when the current sucked us underneath it. I saw Robert disappear beneath a thick pile of cedar fronds; I had enough warning to duck.

Then we reached the part of the river where the two separate flows around the island merged back together, and we learned why the native Snoqualmie people called the river Toltue - which means "Swift Water"...

We ran down a small section of ripples, and the canoe grounded right at the top of a steep section of white water, at the end of which it took a sharp bend to the left, and seemed to be fast-flowing but level after that.

"What do you think?" I asked apprehensively. "It looks fine," said Robert.

We both pushed hard with our paddles. The canoe took off like a rocket down the white water, banked sharply at the bend and turned upside down, pitching us both into the river. I was trapped underneath, jammed by the current between it and a large rock, but with my head above water and able to breathe. I couldn't see Robert.

I frantically struggled out of the grip of the current, ducked under the hull and spotted Robert disappearing downstream, floating backwards and blowing like a breaching whale (luckily, we were both wearing lifejackets).

The one thought running through my head was what I'd say next day to my boss at Microsoft - Steve Shaiman. "Oh, no! I've lost the Grandfather of Type!"

It was about then I realized, first of all how cold the water was, and second that there was a woman frantically jumping up and down on the deck of her house overlooking the river, shouting, "You guys are crazy! That water was snow a couple of hours ago! A woman drowned there, just last week!"

The current was a bit slower downstream. Robert managed to beach himself on the wrong side of the river, then waded back. He was blue with cold, covered in bruises and small cuts - and otherwise totally unconcerned. Just another boating adventure...

He was persuaded by the couple who owned the house into a hot shower and dry clothes. Next day he went back and retrieved the fiberglass canoe, which was broken-up enough that it would never make another trip.

I told the story in the office next day. Then colleagues would come over and say, "Did you hear about the time Robert..."

My former colleague George Moore tells the story of how he went for a rowing-trip with Robert on Lake Washington - in Robert's inflatable dinghy, which began to rapidly deflate while they were out in the middle of the lake. George spent the return trip, red-faced, with his mouth glued to the inflation-valve, trying desperately to keep the craft inflated enough to make the shore...

Robert Norton 1929-2001. Never forgotten.

Advertising Is Not A Magic Windmill For eBooks Or Professional Content...

2009-06-12T12:34:00.001-07:00

I'm grateful to my former colleague Kevin Larson, of the ClearType and Readability Research team at Microsoft, for posting the link to this cartoon on FaceBook. It made me laugh, because of course it also made me think.

All sorts of people with all kinds of political opinions read this blog.

Some are revolutionaries: "All content must be free! News should be free! Books should be free!"

Some are professional news publishers: "We've made our news free on the Web, and we're hoping that we can make a good enough income from advertising to pay for gathering it, but it's tough since we can't sell full-page display ads any more, and we can see newspapers going out of business - but we live in hope".

Some are book publishers: "We're experimenting with digital books but we don't want to cannibalize our existing print business, although that means we still have to carry its production costs, and we're afraid that once books get out there in digital formats they'll just be copied and we'll lose all revenue".

Many revolutionaries believe that most professional publishers are big corporate entities who have been making obscene profits and controlling what information makes it into print. "Just like the record companies did with music, and we know what happened to them...".

It's a worry. I don't think it's heresy to say that not all writers - and not all information - are created equal. I think it's a good thing that the barriers to publishing have come down. A lot of material which didn't get published in the past - but deserved to be - now has the ability to compete on equal terms with professionally-published content. But you ought to be able to depend on professionally-published content to be better-written, -edited and -produced. If the professional content isn't better, then it deserves to lose out.

I can't for the life of me see how you can get advertising to pay for books. It may pay for news. But even there, I have to say I'm spoiled by my life as a Brit until less than 15 years ago. Anyone brought up on the BBC has a hard time watching US television, (or listening to US radio) because of the way the programs are so broken up by advertising. Even commercial television in the UK confined its adverts to between programs or in slots every 15 minutes during programs (at least, it used to - things may have changed...)

The BBC received its income from the UK Government - which got part of that back from viewers via the annual TV License fee. The model of state-funded TV worked in the case of the BBC - which always seemed independent enough to get into trouble with the Government of the Day, whatever its political complexion. Of course, in many countries it doesn't work that way...

Microsoft and Real Networks are trying an "unlimited music for a monthly license fee" model. Remains to be seen how that will pan out, especially given Apple's virtual monopoly of the digital music player marketplace.

I'd really like to hear people's ideas on this issue, related to reading material. But positive ideas only, please! If you just want to rant at The System or The Mindless Revolutionaries, please do it somewhere else...

Ascender Proposes New Web Font Format To Break Font Embedding Logjam...

2009-06-11T16:11:00.000-07:00

Ascender: Trying to break a logjam - sweet if they succeed...

Font vendor Ascender Corporation has proposed a new solution - based on a new Webfont format - which it hopes will solve the problem of using fonts on the Web and meet the needs of both Web designers and font developers.

The proposal has been put forward to try to break a logjam over Web font embedding, involving two competing solutions to support fonts on the Web using the @font-face support in the CSS 2.1 specification.

Embedded OpenType - proposed by Microsoft and implemented in Internet Explorer
Linking to raw TrueType and OpenType fonts, implemented by Firefox, Chrome and Opera

Font vendors have opposed raw font linking because the threat they feel it poses to their Intellectual Property.

At the same time, Firefox, Chrome and Opera oppose EOT because they believe it gives Microsoft an unfair advantage (since Internet Explorer has supported it since 1996), and because they feel it is too complex, smacks too much of Digital Rights Management, and has IP issues associated with the compression it uses.

The Ascender proposal is for a new .OTW web font format, to replace both raw fonts and EOT. It claims the new Web-specific format will ensure that all fonts, both free fonts and commercial fonts, can be used on web sites.

In announcing the proposal, Ascender said: "High quality typography on the web will never reach its full potential unless the needs of web designers and font developers are addressed. This solution is easy for designers to use and for browser makers to implement, and can be scaled from single page blogs to large corporate web sites. Our solution is also free of proprietary and patent roadblocks, and most importantly is, in our opinion, acceptable to font developers wishing to minimize unauthorized use and uncontrolled re-distribution of their font software.

"Most font developers believe that without a technological check-point (even a simple one), that web developers and server owners will not understand that they may not simply copy a font from a workstation and use it on the web. Further, many are concerned about ‘deep linking/inline linking’ by unlicensed third parties."

The new format includes proposals for subsetting, to reduce the size of files which would have to be downloaded for fonts with large character sets (e.g. Japanese or Korean), and simple obfuscation of the raw font files to create a barrier to hinder unauthorized font usage.

For technical details of how the new format will work and how new .OTW fonts would be created, see the Font Embedding website.

Ascender sent me a copy of the proposal and asked for my views.

Although I was the person who first proposed that Microsoft should open up its previously-proprietary EOT solution and present it to the W3C as OpenSource, I have to say that I don't care what the eventual accepted Webfont solution turns out to be, as long as:

Font vendors are happy enough with the proposal that they agree to license fonts for Web use.
All the browsers support one single standard.

And that's really the acid test for Ascender's announcement : Will both font vendors and browsers support it?

This issue needs to get solved. I await the responses with bated breath...

eBooks Will Make More Headway On Reading Than The "Vanilla Web"...

2009-06-10T12:56:00.001-07:00

Here's what I want my online book to look like to the reader: A screenshot of the original print version, taken from Adobe InDesign on the Macintosh

As my online friend Richard Fink surmised, I was unable to resist making some experiments to try reproducing Tanya's illustrated book on the Web.

If you read the comments on my previous post, you'll see also that Roger Sperberg asked a key question: "Do you think that ebooks — even ones on ereaders that share rendering engines with browsers, like Bookworm — will make more headway on (readability) than the web in general?"

I'm sorry to have to say that the answer is that I'm certain readers will do better - at least the ones that don't share rendering engines with browsers - and that the Web cannot become a real platform for publishing while the final display of book content for the reader is at the mercy of those different rendering engines, because they destroy any hope of consistency for publishers - even using standard markup.

It's a sad fact that increasingly-popular Web standards are no help to the online book publisher at all. To test this, I was careful to use only Web-standards HTML and CSS3, and validate it with the W3C's tools.

Here's what FireFox did with my content on the Macintosh. Safari 4 did exactly the same. The image failed to move up to the second column. So now the reader has to scroll to see the image, and can't see the image title in the heading - which should appear alongside it.

Internet Explorer produced pretty much the same on Windows as FF and Safari did on the Macintosh

The best of a poor bunch...FireFox on Windows

As you can see from these screen shots, the results were disappointing. The pages were all created on my MacBook Pro laptop, 17-inch, 133ppi (1920 x 1200). I had hoped (oh, you poor deluded and naive fool, Bill!) that if I got the results the way I wanted on my screen, then users with smaller displays could use browser zoom to make the pages fit their own. That's the way it ought to work.

However, the same markup rendered differently on each browser. FireFox on Windows, and Internet Explorer, at least have FullScreen views (and the FF developers have done some work on it recently - I can tell because I filed a repaint bug a few weeks ago, and now the problem's gone...)

I want FullScreen because I want readers to be able to get the effect of the book design without any annoying menus, toolbars, favorites bars or any of the other rubbish which is necessary when you're browsing, but visually distracting when you're trying to read. I never want scrolling in a book of this type!

FullScreen doesn't exist in Safari, or in FireFox on the Macintosh.

Are any of the browser developers listening to publishers of content meant for sustained, immersive reading? It doesn't look like it to me.

The potential of the Web for illustrated content ought to be huge. For example, there are thousands of beautifully illustrated books which not many people can afford - like for instance, the Arthur Rackham-illustrated version of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream". It ought to be easily possible to put works like this online. But the only really satisfactory versions of these I've seen are in "reader" applications created for that purpose (either as browser plugins or standalone applications).

As long as there's no consistency between rendering on different Web browsers, they'll never be able to handle this kind of content in the right way. And does anyone seriously believe we'd ever get all the browser teams to agree to do this? No chance whatsoever.

One interesting fact I did find during this experiment was that - on my 133ppi machine - the best rendering of the text itself, in the particular font I used, was on the Macintosh, and not using ClearType on Windows...

Don't get me wrong. I still believe that the best reading experience you can get is on Windows, using ClearType with a font optimized for that purpose.

However, creating a font like that involves a non-trivial amount of hinting. The font I chose for the book was Papyrus, which isn't well-hinted at all, and has a deliberately-ragged edge to the characters, which are themselves pretty thin and spidery.

I picked Papyrus for its artistic look. It suited the content admirably, and works nicely when printed. On the screen, however, the best-rendered versions are definitely the ones created using the Macintosh engine. It's probably also a result of the higher resolution of this screen. At lower resolutions, Mac rendering is blurrier - but the blur becomes less intrusive as resolution gets better. I've included a comparison below as a 24-bit bitmap graphic so there's no fudging of the issue by JPEG or other compression. Click on it to see the actual unscaled image.

Rendering comparisons: The Macintosh versions on the left look much better on my display than the ClearType ones on the right. Safari 4 rendering on the Macintosh is identical to FireFox - which is the best by a long way (and obviously both using the same Mac OSX system rendering) - even better than the original in InDesign for reading on screen...

A Tale of Two Pages: It Was The Best Of Times, It Was The Worst Of Times...

2009-06-05T12:20:00.000-07:00

The cover of Tanya's book (© Tanya Hill, 2009)

Over the past few months, I've spent quite a lot of my time designing and building Web pages to try to improve my knowledge, learn Web-standards HTML and CSS, and see how far I could push readability. I became immersed in learning ways to overcome the serious limitations which still exist on the Web.

However, now I have time on my hands I have been undertaking a project for my artist wife Tanya, who has been studying and painting the native wetland birds on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. She has an exhibition scheduled for next year, and we'd like to publish a book to coincide with it. For more on the wetland birds, see Tanya's blog.

So I've found myself back in old territory - creating what I hope will be a high-quality, heavily-illustrated, printed book.

The highly-endangered Hawaiian gallinule: Courting in the reeds
(© Tanya Hill, 2009)

It has been a really enlightening experience to be able to compare the two processes - printed-page design, and Web page design.

To paraphrase Charles Dickens (From A Tale of Two Cities), as far as producing print is concerned, this is The Best of Times... The publishing tools available to the print designer are outstanding, highly-evolved, easy to learn and use. Many of the problems which used to beset print production in the past are long gone - for example, color matching, now taken care of by the systems themselves. Once set up, you can forget it.

When it comes to creating Web content, I believe this is still The Worst of Times. No-one has yet produced the right Web authoring tool, because the geeks - and not the "creative professionals" are in control. Oh, I know that's a gross over-simplification. Many creative professionals have forced themselves to learn Web technology, and many geeks are also creative.

But the process of visual design and great typography on the Web is still far too hard.

After some thought, I picked Adobe's InDesign publishing software to design, lay out and typeset the pages. In the past, I've mostly used Microsoft Publisher, since I worked at the company and it was installed as part of Microsoft Office.

However, this time I'm working with many large high-resolution scanned images, cropped and cleaned up in Adobe Photoshop. And I have to be sure that the color-matching is correct all the way through the process. Adobe Bridge allows you to synchronize color handling across all your Creative Suite applications. Hence InDesign seemed like the logical choice...

The scans are done by ArtScans in California, who have been doing terrific work for us for years, creating scans of Tanya's artwork we use to produce high-quality prints for sale. The scan files come to us with an embedded ArtScans color profile, which Photoshop picks up and uses. Some of the scans are 530Mb or more in size.

The InDesign process is simple. Choose your page size, margins etc. Flow in the text. Choose typefaces and sizes for body text, headings etc. Place the pictures. Proof the results on an ink-jet printer. Create a package with all the files and send it to the printer. Of course there are lots of details to take of - but it's all really straightforward.

Heading stack, drop capital, nice font! Oh, to be able to do this easily on the Web!

Key parts of the visual effect you create are the typefaces you choose, and of course there are tens of thousands from which to pick. I got creative and built a "heading stack" which uses three different sizes of the same typeface, creatively linespaced into a kind of "vertical kerning".

What a delight the whole process is, compared with the brutality, crudeness and downright missing functionality of Web authoring.

Take the fonts, for instance. I picked Papyrus, because I felt it suited the artistic nature of the content. No problem. And because InDesign is a professional's tool, it knows that I have no true bold or italic versions of this font on my system - so it won't let me choose them, and thus won't create horrible, computer-skewed or emboldened bastardized versions. (Italic text is NOT slanted Roman!)

I couldn't use Papyrus on the Web - not unless I wanted to either limit myself to users running Internet Explorer and hence with Embedded OpenType support, or create my text as bitmaps - ugh!

Try to create the heading stack and be sure it will display correctly on any Web browser? Unless you create a bitmap, you couldn't. And of course people viewing the bitmap on different-resolution displays would get different sizes. Using Zoom to scale it would look awful, and so on and on and on...

Publishing is a highly-creative process. Creative writing. Creative editing. Creative Design and layout. Creative Typography. At least print publishing is. Web publishing tries to be, but you keep running up against the limitations of the medium.

It won't last forever. It will get better. Print's had 550 years to evolve. The Web hasn't even had two decades. But the sooner we solve the problem of fonts on the Web - and the sooner someone builds a great Web design tool for creative people who don't want to learn to be software engineers, the better...

Let's get a standard set of markup and CSS defined. Let's have all browsers support it and display it in the same way. Let's get adaptive layout in place so the content looks its best on whatever display it's viewed.

It's not rocket science. But until it's done the Web won't be a real publishing platform.

Red-footed booby (© Tanya Hill, 2009)

Font Industry Needs To Step Up - To The Screen...

2009-06-03T12:51:00.000-07:00

A PageMaker 3.5-inch diskette - I still have my original set from 1985...

The explosion of word processing and desktop publishing in the 1980s was a huge bonanza for the font industry. It took the arcane world of printing and typesetting - previously only accessible to those willing to make large capital investments - and opened it up to anyone who had a desktop computer and a printer.

Laser printers made it possible for anyone to create high-quality output. You could proof work and know that it was a true representation of what you'd get when you output the same files to a high-resolution imagesetter. "What You See Is What You Get" was the mantra of the day...

The result of all this was that millions of people who would previously never have known or cared about fonts realized they had to have them. Font sales went through the roof.

So did font piracy, of course. Many people ignored the time and effort which went into making fonts, and blithely passed on copies to friends. This happened on such a scale that the industry could not police individuals; instead, it focused its energies on selling fonts to design professionals, and site licenses to corporations which previously had bought only one copy of a font. But there were lots of sales, and times were good.

The intended final output of desktop publishing was print, which would be created at high resolution. So screen representations of fonts were pretty poor. In the beginning, your system had two different sets of fonts - high-resolution outlines for print, and low-resolution bitmaps for the screen. What You See Is Sort Of Like What You Get...

Then along came scalable font technology. You no longer needed bitmap fonts for the screen; those were created on the fly from the high-resolution outlines. Of course, it wasn't that simple - there weren't enough pixels to represent all the features of characters, especially at body-text sizes like 10point and 12point. So trade-offs had to be made.(Anyone who'd like to know a lot more about these issues should read Richard Rubinstein's book, Digital Typography, in my list of Books I Recommend).

The tradeoffs were made by creating programs which told the screen rasterizer (the software which scales the high-resolution outlines to size and then fills them with dots) what to do at specific sizes and specific resolutions. These programs were called hints.

There were two different paths:

Microsoft: We pick TrueType, because it gives us control down to the individual pixel and we can make the rasterizer create exactly the bitmaps we want.
Adobe: That's too much work. We'll make the rasterizer itself smarter, and have a more basic hinting structure. And we'll stick with our own font format.

That was the whole basis of The Font Wars...

Both were right - and both were wrong.

Microsoft created the best onscreen fonts I'd ever seen. But the work involved was huge. A team of folks from Microsoft and Monotype created thousands lines of programming for each font. It was a tour de force - and a tour de wallet; no other company with pockets less deep could have done it.

So Adobe was right, too. In those days, it was too expensive to contemplate, for companies and individuals without the ability to amortize costs across millions of copies of Windows and Office. Monotype, around 1997, produced a set of fonts which they called Enhanced Screen Quality. They were a little better than the norm - but their quality didn't come near that of the Windows 3.1 core fonts.

Those Windows fonts were "brute force" hinted, with lots of Delta hints (adjustments down to tiny levels of detail such as: in this font, in the letter 'a', at 10point, on a 96ppi display, turn on this pixel). What often happened is that the hinter had to artificially distort the shape of the outline to force a pixel to fall inside or outside it, so the rasterizer would turn it on (or off)

For a detailed explanation of hinting, see the Microsoft Typography website.

The TrueType programming language in which you created those instructions was nothing like that friendly or understandable. You not only had to have a typographer's eye, but you had to be able to program in an assembler-like syntax. There are only a handful of real experts in the world.

ClearType exposed problems with that "brute force" approach. Weird things would happen to some of those original distorted outlines. Characters would explode, or collapse.

The old hinting model had to be re-thought. What came out of that was a kinder, gentler - and much easier - approach to hinting. By way of years of investment, the hinting tools also became much easier to use, even acquiring a GUI.

Adobe's screen fonts have also improved markedly over the years.

Screen resolutions are improving. With ClearType rendering (and its clones), and technologies like eInk, we are close to the tipping-point.

We're in the middle of the biggest publishing explosion in history. But people are publishing to the screen, not paper.They'll want great fonts for the screen - so for a second time there's a huge potential market.

There are still issues around font linking versus font embedding as a solution to the problem of fonts on the Web. But there's a lot going on behind the scenes, and I'm confident there will be a practical solution soon, acceptable to the font industry as well as web developers and regular users.

It doesn't matter that it won't be the Embedded OpenType format I recommended. EOT acted as a catalyst to motivate everyone - those who proposed different solutions, those who just opposed anything from Microsoft, and the font industry itself - which needed to bond together to secure its own future.

The font industry must realize by now that print is going away. There's little doubt of that. My former boss, Dick Brass, once predicted that the New York Times would print its last paper edition in 2018. He was ridiculed at the time. But with the recent closures of newspapers such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, he may actually have been too conservative in his prediction. I wonder if the New York Times actually has nine more paper years left...

Eventually the trillions of corporate documents printed every year will go away too. Once we have reached the point where reading on screen is as good as reading from paper, the many other benefits of digital documents really come into play:

Storing documents
Finding the document you need
Keeping documents up to date
etc.

The font industry needs to realize that if it has a future, it's on the screen. And it needs to focus on that. Not all the fonts which worked for print will work well on screen until we have 300ppi displays.

We need new fonts designed for on-screen reading. And we can't leave it to Microsoft to provide them, as it has done in the past.

How I (Almost) Became A Russian Porn Star... (from the Bill Hill Archives)

2009-05-21T11:28:00.000-07:00

Scottish secret weapon unveiled in Moscow. No low-angle shots, please!

A funny thing happened on my way to the Kremlin...

In 2006, I was in Moscow for the very first annual conference of the World Editors' Forum to be held in the former Soviet Union. My Microsoft colleague Mike Cooper and I had been invited to speak.

I really liked Moscow. But get ready for "culture shock", if it's your first visit.

It began at Domodedovo, one of Moscow's two airports. After an overnight flight from Seattle to London, a four-hour layover in the Business Class lounge and a second flight to Moscow, I stumbled off the plane and through immigration.

Stepping out of the arrivals gate into the main terminal, my main thoughts were: "Get some Russian money". "Get a taxi." "Get to the hotel". "Get some sleep". Before I'd even left arrivals, I was mobbed by a bunch of guys who all looked like extras from a Hollywood movie about the Russian Mafiya (shaved head, three-day stubble, everyone dressed in black leather jackets...) and all shouting "Taxi?" "Taxi?".

Hmmm - better not get a taxi until I can pay for it. Ah, there's a sign I recognize - ATM. Brushing my way through the faux Mafiya, I plunk my case down in front of the machine, take out my Visa card, swipe it. "Enter Amount". 350. "Dollars or roubles?" I'm sure I asked for $350 worth of roubles. What I got was a stack of roubles that would choke a horse. I later calculated it was worth about $1200 - way beyond my normal ATM limit for withdrawals. Quick - hide it from the taxi Mafiya!

OK. Now I can get a cab (Actually, now I can probably buy a cab...). Where's the rank? I don't want to use one of these casual airport guys if I can help it; I'd like an "official" taxi. If it was yellow, that would be reassuring.

There is no taxi rank at Domodedovo, as far as I can see - at least, there wasn't when I was there. You follow the signs for Ground Transportation - thanking God for icons instead of text - and arrive outside the terminal. And you end up in an alley, made up of two high wooden walls, and - oh no! - lined from end to end with more Mafiya...

Speaking of icons, they're a lifesaver when you're in Russia. I can speak English, and studied French for five years. I can usually manage to work out what a sign means in any of the Latin-based languages, and find my way around. But it doesn't work with Russian.

The fact I couldn't understand the language, though, didn't stop me from building two Russian screen fonts while I worked at Aldus, so we could have self-running products demos in the language. In gratitude, the Eastern European sales director brought me back a beautiful present from the Moscow Book Fair: The Life of Aldus Manutius - in Russian. It's still one of my treasures...

Speaking of icons, they don't always work. Imagine you're a kilt-wearing Scotsman. Which restroom door do you pick?

Scotsmen | Men

Back at the airport, I give up and accept reality. There are no yellow cabs to be seen. So I brush past a couple of the heavier-looking guys and try to find one who's smiling. "Taxi?" he says. "President's Hotel", say I. "OK, we go".

Now this guy's about nine feet tall and four feet wide at the shoulders. Grabs my wheeled carry-on bag and sets off at a fair clip. Better keep up. We race across one car park. Second car park. Third - ahhh! He throws my bag into the back of - you've guessed it - a Lada, and we're off.

Turns out almost everyone in Moscow with a car moonlights as a cab driver. We drive for about 20 miles, first of all through birch forests, then past interminable rows of tired-looking apartment blocks. Every hundred yards or so, there's a group of (mostly) men, gathered together. I see the bottles of beer and vodka. Ah - Glasgow on a Friday night, but without the pubs...

Moscow's a city of contrasts; sitting in traffic with an ancient truck belching diesel fumes on one side, and a brand-new $350,000 Bentley limousine on the other...

Turns out the World Association of Newspapers has been very kind in its choice of hotel for speakers. The "President's Hotel" is exactly that; it's where Presidents stay when they visit Moscow...

Security's so tight, the taxi driver can't drop me at the lobby. There's a barrier across the gate, with two armed policemen on duty. You show your passport and are admitted through a security turnstile. (That was to lead to another fun incident later).

I check in, and go up to my room. Except it's not a room, it's a suite, on one of the top floors, with the most staggering view of Moscow and the Moskva River. Right opposite my window - at about the same height - is the huge memorial to Peter The Great. Wow! Gilded onion-shaped domes glitter in the distance. We're not in Kansas any more, Dorothy! Took me two days to discover that the door I thought led to a closet was in fact a second, guest lavatory...

The statue of Peter The Great, erected on its own "island" in the Moskva River - one of the tallest outdoor sculptures in the world. Peter strove for Russian maritime supremacy. My hotel in the background...

Next afternoon I have to go to the Kremlin for the opening ceremony of the conference. Then-President Vladimir Putin is giving the keynote speech. (During that same visit I get to meet Mikail Gorbachev. It's been a long and interesting journey from the East end of Glasgow...).

I call up the cab company recommended in the conference notes. A cab will be at my hotel at 5pm.

As usual, I'm waiting outside the lobby ten minutes early. Takes me a few minutes to realize there's absolutely no motor traffic going past, none of the normal to-ing and fro-ing you'd expect at a big hotel.

Oh, oh! Cabs aren't allowed past the security barrier... So I walk out into the street. Sure enough, there's a cab waiting. It's even from the company I'd called. But it's not my ride. In (very) broken English, the driver agrees to call the company; my car will be along in five minutes.

So I wait on the sidewalk, growing more and more anxious by the minute. I should mention, at this point, that I'm wearing a Scottish kilt - my standard business suit - and might as well have a sign around my neck saying: "Please Mug or Kidnap Me - I'm from Out of Town".

About fifteen minutes later, one of the armed cops walks over and says - in great English - "What are you waiting for?" I explain I have to get to the Kremlin in under an hour. "I will get you a car," he says.

He steps out into the street, holds up his hand and stops the first car he sees, opens the door and tells the driver: "Take this man to the Kremlin!". To me, the cop says, "You give him 200 roubles."

The driver, of course, looks like yet another Mafiya extra. Speaks not a word of English. And he clearly doesn't know his way around the Moscow traffic system. We get lost. Three times he stops and asks policemen for directions.

He must have been panicked. I mean, you're driving peacefully along the road, when you're flagged down by an armed policeman, and told to to take a strangely-dressed man to the Kremlin - he was probably terrified by the thought that if he failed this mission, it was the Gulag, for sure...

Eventually we get to the huge line of security turnstiles guarding the entrance to the Kremlin. I find my way to the hall where the opening ceremony's to take place. There are hundreds of people milling around.

I can't see anyone I know (no real surprise). There's an Indian couple - he in business suit, she in sari. I'll talk to them, I thought. They'll speak English for sure, and I always get along really well with Indian people.

Turns out there are hundreds of press photographers milling around, too...

A guy in a Scottish kilt, talking to an Indian lady in a sari? Talk about "The picture that says International Conference". Suddenly, we're the center of attention. Flashes start to go off all around.

Next morning, in the hall between conference sessions, I'm hailed by a booming Russian voice. "It's you! You're famous! You're in all the Russian papers and on TV today!" "You're like a porn star!". "Can I get your business card?"

I think it was the knees. In my whole time in Moscow, mine were the only male knees I ever saw. I'm a Scot. I was born with a license to bare my knees whenever and wherever I want - that's why God gave Scotsmen hairy legs.

The guy turned out to be the editor of a Russian news bureau. I waited months for the call to star in a Russian porn movie. But it never happened...

Mike Cooper and I managed to walk around Moscow a little. The Kremlin. Red Square. St. Basil's Cathedral. The Moskva River. Amazing! And that's when I met Boris.

St. Basil's

Walking along by the Moskva River, I realized I was being followed - either by a stray dog, or a KGB agent with a great disguise. He must have followed me for about three miles, stopping every time I did. Turns out there are quite a number of dogs living on the streets in Moscow - sleeping under cars, that sort of thing.

Boris and I walking along the banks of the Moskva River. You can see the outer wall of the Kremlin behind the river ferry. I am the only person wearing shorts in the whole of Moscow...

Now, I'm a sucker for dogs. If it had been Seattle, I'd probably have ended up taking Boris home. But there was no way I'd ever get him out of Russia, and I was sad to leave him behind...

Boris. He never told me his real name...

My overall impression of Russia at the time? Well I can't really speak for the whole country, but Moscow was really jumping; it looked as if someone had exploded a giant capitalism bomb in the city center, and most people were trying to make a buck or two in the new reality. Don't know what it's like right now in the global recession - pretty rough for a lot of people, I would think.

I've never been attracted to Communism. However, as a Brit you have to be forever grateful for the huge sacrifices the Russian people made in World War II. Without them, it's pretty likely Hitler would not have been stopped, and Britain would not have survived until the USA entered the war.

My father did his part to help Russia in wartime. He was a seaman, manning a "Hedgehog" depth-charge mortar on one of the Royal Navy's anti-submarine destroyers, escorting convoys carrying fuel and ammunition to Murmansk - the dreaded Russian Convoy duty, so well captured in Alistair MacLean's novel, "HMS Ulysses", one of my Recommended Books on this blog.

eBook Publishers Learn A Lesson: The Markup Is Not The Book...

2009-05-20T14:36:00.000-07:00

RocketBook: Less of a rocket, more a damp firecracker...

I joined the fledgling eBook team at Microsoft eleven years ago this month. When we began work on eBooks back in 1998, it was clear from the outset that no publisher wanted to sign up to supporting a single eBook format.

At that time, there were two eBook contenders with devices in the marketplace - RocketBook and SoftBook - both of which are now either gathering dust in the closets of "early adopters", or taking up space in landfill somewhere...

SoftBook: Turned out to be just too soft...

Each used its own format. Microsoft Reader was a third. Soon, there were eBook readers from Adobe and a host of others. They proliferated like weeds.

Very understandably, no publisher wanted to bet its entire eBook future on a single format. It was a problem everyone recognized. Out of that grew a markup standard called Open eBook. Eventually, the Open eBook organization morphed into the International Digital Publishing Forum, and Open eBook became ePub.

It was clear to everyone that there would be different eBook formats for a long time to come - perhaps forever. The problem is that if the publisher wants any kind of Digital Rights Management (DRM) or protection, the raw markup somehow has to be wrapped in a secured software package.

In the case of Reader, Open eBook markup was converted to .Lit. If the book's being sold in Adobe's Digital Editions, then it's wrapped by Adobe's Content Server and served up as .epub.

Amazon has entered the eBook fray in a spectacular way with its Kindle, which uses its own .azw format (again, with digital rights protection).

Since Amazon has its own "closed" device, its DRM can be a lot more transparent to its customers than DRM which has to protect content in an open software environment like a Windows PC or a Macintosh. Both MS-Reader and Adobe Digital Editions require the reader to Activate the reader software they're using.

Many people hate DRM, and suggest that publishers are trying to hang onto the past. "It hasn't worked for music, or anything else", goes the litany,"So why do publishers believe it will work for books?" These are often the same people who insist all old business models are dead, and just don't know it yet, and that all content will eventually be free.

Personally, as a writer, I'm not ready just yet to give up on being paid for my work. I'm writing a book right now, and if it takes me a year, I'd like to hope I'll be able to pay the mortgage at the end of it.

Unlike many of the litanists, I believe that publishers and their editors perform a vital function in improving the quality of material which gets published. They need to get real, though, accept that the removal of the requirement to print and distribute physical copies of books has driven publishing costs down dramatically, and re-work their business models accordingly.

eBooks should be a lot cheaper, and could be a lot cheaper, without harming publishers' or writers' incomes. But a world of nothing but free content is like free cable TV - 500 Channels, and you can spend hours searching it to find there's nothing you want to watch.

However, the issue here isn't the different ways of wrapping standard markup. What happens to it when it gets rendered?

It's exactly the same problem that I wrote about yesterday on this blog in relation to the Web. I created a page which used absolutely Web-standards HTML markup, and a standard CSS3 stylesheet - both verified as such by the WorldWideWeb Consortium's Validation tools.

Yet the final rendering worked the way I wanted it to on only one Web browser. On three others it broke. One just made my page slightly ugly - the others hit it with a truck.

And there's the issue for eBook publishers. Even though they all standardize on ePub as their markup, what happens to it when the reader sees it is out of their control.

I'm not talking here about the reader's "personal comfort" decisions - like making the text larger, for instance. Readers have to be able to do that.

I'm talking about what happens at a lower level, in the rendering engine and its text and page composition engine.

Take Microsoft Reader, for example. At its heart is a text composition engine called Page and Table Services - the result of hundreds of man-years of effort by one of the best teams in the company (I can say that - I never worked in that team).

Microsoft Reader - still a pretty comfortable read...

At the heart of Adobe's Digital Editions is that company's terrific text composition expertise. Adobe (and Aldus, which it acquired in 1994) has been doing this for decades, for professional printers and publishers with the highest possible standards.

Both will compose to their own metrics.

Huckleberry Finn in PDF: Nice! (But you can't change the text size)

In Adobe's Digital Editions, I looked at two free ePub books, and one free book in Adobe's PDF format. Huckleberry Finn, in PDF, was beautifully set; nice line-length, great word and line-spacing, hyphenation and justification. Just about perfect. The two ePubs, though, were a bit rough - justification but no hyphenation, and lots of other problems...

ePub in Digital Editions: Not such a good read...

Amazon clearly has its own engine in Kindle. It's not bad - but it does do weird stuff that it shouldn't, and doesn't do other things that it should. It's readable, but could be improved.

(Disclosure here: I have to earn a living outside Microsoft now, and there's a limit to how much free advice I'm going to give...)

I'm clearly not the only one who's spotted this problem. On the IDPF's own homepage is a Open Letter from the Association of American Publishers, which says:

"We encourage the IDPF to provide support to facilitate implementation industry-wide. We recognize that a number of issues remain, and we encourage the IDPF to work with its member organizations to develop guidelines/plans for addressing:

Quality assurance of any other formats which are created based on the EPUB version
Conversion to .LIT and eReader
How to handle books that do not have reflowable text and are not appropriate for EPUB"

Well over a decade on the road to eBooks, and we're clearly not there yet...

Web-Standards Markup Certainly Won't Give You Cross-Browser Sites at higher resolution...

2009-05-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

How I want my site to look: Web-Standards HTML 4.01 and CSS3 in Internet Explorer 8. Click on any of the screenshots in this post for a larger view. They're saved as JPEGs.

I hope readers of this blog who struggled all the way through the long post on screen resolution now understand why I'm so keen on being able to create paginated, multi-column content on the Web which people can read with as few distractions as possible.

If you read all of that post, you did a lot of scrolling in order to read the single-column layout. I hope - like me - you grew to resent all of the unused screen real estate either side of that single column.

Single-column layout can get tiring, and make the reader want to go elsewhere. But the Web shouldn't be a place only for those with Attention Deficit. It should be a place where people can publish any kind of content, and where people who want to spend time reading that content should be able to do so as comfortably as possible.

If you prefer to bounce around the Web like a gadfly, spending a little time at each of a large number of different sites, that's fine. But the Web shouldn't force you to behave that way. It ought to be possible to take the time to absorb information, too - and feel comfortable while doing so.

I've been doing another set of experiments on my website, and produced a set of screenshots to illustrate what I'm trying to do, and some of the problems I've hit. Some of those problems arise because I'm trying to live in a "high-resolution world", and doing both my website authoring and viewing on my new MacBook Pro laptop at 133ppi (pixels per inch).

The more I use this machine, the more I realize the future I want could be a lot closer than I thought. Let me explain...

The resolution of human vision is about 600 dpi (dots per inch). So theoretically we need 600ppi screens to make what we see on a computer as "real" as the natural world.

The problem is that to go from the ~100ppi of the average computer screen of today to 600ppi means computing 36 times as many pixels per second (n-squared, because you increase the resolution in both directions) That's a huge mountain to climb for graphics cards, the batteries which run them - and the heat they generate.

That's not necessary. The glossy magazines you buy are normally printed at no more than 185 lines per inch. And with ClearType - which is a resolution multiplier for text, since it has 3x the number of sub-pixels with which to work - you have gone past the equivalent of 185ppi on this 133ppi display.

It's more than that, though. Not all high-resolution displays are created equal. I had a 133ppi Dell laptop about 12 years ago, and a 147ppi Dell laptop ten years ago. But I have to say, their displays were not in the same class as this 133ppi display from Apple. It's stunningly bright and crisp. It seems a lot brighter running Vista than MacOSX - which probably means I'd be voraciously devouring battery charge when running without mains power. But I don't really do that very often. And I like the brightness. Makes OSX look positively dingy...

It's not only ClearType that looks good. I went on to Adobe's site to try out their new DF4 rendering, and found it very crisp and readable on this screen.

It might be that 133ppi on screens of this quality is quite enough resolution - at least until there's some kind of graphics technology breakthrough.

When it comes to Web authoring and surfing, email, FaceBook, LinkedIn, news sites etc., I still prefer the Windows versions of all the browsers.

Now I'm no longer at Microsoft, I've been deliberately using FireFox as my default browser to make sure there's no lingering "you always prefer what you're used to" bias. I also have the latest versions or betas of Chrome and Safari, and of course the shipping version of Internet Explorer 8.

I'm using only Web-standards markup. Everything gets checked using the W3C's HTML and CSS validation tools.

Since this Mac screen is so bright, I found the white backgrounds I'd been using previously on my site to be punching out too much light, even with multicolumn text layout. So I switched to white text on a black background - same as on this blog. However, even the white text on that seemed too bright. So I ended up with light gray on black. It reads very well on this display, and feels very restful for the eyes. I'd love to get your feedback on how it looks on your screen. Here's the link to the test page...

I included the Internet Explorer 8 screen shot at the beginning of this post because that's exactly how I wanted my site to look. Authoring in Notepad++ gave me results in Internet Explorer which were entirely predictable. Unfortunately, the same was not true in any of the other browsers, even with absolutely Web-standards markup.

I'm not certain whether the problem is the way different browsers deal with the markup - it really shouldn't be - or whether it relates to the high-resolution display and the way they cope with that.

In IE8, I found the 12pt text I'd been using on my site was too small at this resolution. I took it up to 17point, and changed all other text sizes to fit. I was really pleased with how the final page turned out.

Then I fired up the other browsers to check it.

FireFox3

Firefox - not too dreadful, but a few glitches...

Badly positioned paragraph
Navigation buttons have floated to wrong position
Photo not scaled up to fit column
One-line caption becomes two lines, changing column line-break
This is an issue I've seen in Firefox for ages, and one they should fix. When you go FullScreen (F11, or Fn-F11 on the Mac) it forgets to repaint the new area of the screen created at the bottom, leaving garbage or old lines of text from the previous rendering.

Google Chrome on Windows Vista

Quite a mess! Lot of content you have scroll to see, since it no longer fits on a single "page".

Headings become too big. Masthead sticks out too far; "SECRET BLOGOZINE" heading becomes two lines, busting the layout
Paragraph sets too big, overflowing space provided
Picture is scaled up too big, sticking out into column 2
Pull quote takes up too many lines; so does all the body text, forcing scrolling to read all content.
No Full Screen switch. I thought the latest beta had one - but it seems to have disappeared. So you end up having to scroll.

Safari4 on Windows Vista

Where did the graphics go? (picture and navigation buttons have all disappeared) Again, you have to scroll to see all the content. Many issues seem similar to Chrome - probably because both use Webkit.

No Full Screen mode
Headings break
Text overflows
Picture didn't show up at all
Navigation buttons got lost
One-line caption becomes two lines
Pull quote takes up too many lines

I have a feeling that the problems with Chrome and Safari are more to do with not handling higher resolutions very well. The issues look very like those I used to hit all the time when switching to higher-resolution devices. I tried using their Zoom capabilities, but that didn't solve the problems either.

Now I'm still quite the newbie here. I'm sure many of you old and grizzled Web designers are shaking your heads, and saying, "Well, he should (or shouldn't) have done X or Y, and that wouldn't have happened".

But why should anyone wanting to create Web content have to learn the secret handshakes? Shouldn't Web authoring be easy and open to everyone? Shouldn't it be democratic - and not controlled by some "priesthood" who understand the "Latin"?

Shouldn't Web-standards markup be the lingua franca? So that if you can speak it, you can talk to anyone, anywhere?

I know I'm still using pixel dimensions on my site. And that means I'm not yet resolution-independent. But shouldn't Web-standards markup at least mean all the browsers handle the same content the same way?

Unless we can get to that point, I don't see a lot of hope for Web standards. If I wanted to create cross-browser, multi-column, paginated content today, I'd be forced to use Adobe's proprietary FLEX and AIR formats and their browser plugins.

Confusion over "screen resolution" causes headaches for users...

2009-05-13T18:41:00.000-07:00

(Apologies in advance - this is a very long blog post, because of its detailed technical nature. I promise in due course to post a version in Word .doc format on my website).

Confusion over what’s commonly referred to as “screen resolution” causes headaches for computer users – literally. People all over the world are having a computing experience that’s nowhere near as good as it could or should be because their displays are wrongly set.

In a comment on my last post, my good online friend Richard Fink said:

“Resolution is a topic that's dimly understood and can really use some detailed explaining. Just wrapping one's head around the vocabulary is difficult. There is the native(?) resolution of the screen (the physical number of "points" the screen is capable of displaying) and then there is the virtual(?) number of points that the OS imposes by rounding out, right? Or wrong? And how does this all relate to pixels and pixel size?
I've done considerable googling on this, have ingested a White Paper on IE's new Adaptive Zoom feature, and yet am still largely in the dark.
Will the new Bill Hill please don his mask and cape and shine some light on this? I sure would appreciate it. Because when you say "resolution independent" I have no idea what that truly means, let alone what the ramifications are.
And I know I'm not alone."

No Richard, you are far from alone...

People normally refer to resolution in terms of the number of pixels horizontally and vertically on the screen; 800 x 600, for example. But what does 800 x 600 really mean?

The term “resolution”, as commonly used, is a misnomer. It’s only a pixel count, and tells you nothing about the actual resolution of that display.

Resolution ought to mean “The level of detail the screen can display”. It ought to be specified as 96 pixels per inch (ppi), or 133ppi, which easily translates to: “Able to resolve detail down to 1/96th of an inch, or 1/133rd of an inch”.

An 800 x 600 desktop display with a 17” screen would be pretty low-resolution – less than 60 pixels per inch. But an 800 x 600 mobile phone, with 3-inch display, would be really high resolution – 333ppi.

Usually, when you buy a display, the specification will almost never mention ppi; instead, manufacturers refer to dot-pitch, measured in millimeters. In my 133ppi example, the 1920x1200 on a 17-inch display, you would get a dot-pitch of .19 mm. ( But Apple is the exception – as usual - and markets the “high-resolution 133ppi screen” of the 17-inch MacBook Pro as a feature).

MacBook Pro 17" model: Marketed with "high-resolution 133ppi display" (And it runs Vista like a dream, using BootCamp...)

In some contexts, manufacturers use the term megapixels, which would be either .7 MP for 1024 x 768 or 2.4 MP, if you include subpixels. It is more common to see megapixels referring to digital cameras – but it is sometimes used for displays.

Mostly, though, people quote only the “pixel count” – e.g. 1024 x 768 – which tells you nothing about the level of detail your screen can display, since it ignores screen size or pixel size. To know the resolution of your display, you need to know both the pixel count and one or other of those numbers.

This is not just semantics. Because these “pixel counts” have become standards, people use them all the time as measures of “resolution” – and that’s only true if you’re always comparing the same size of display.

This “resolution misnomer” affects millions of computer users. As a result of the confusion it has caused, only a minority of computer users are actually reaping the benefits of higher-resolution displays they bought. In most cases, they end up using them at lower resolution - inadvertently turning what should be a really great, crisp visual experience into an awful one. And they get more eye fatigue than they should.

How did this happen?

In the beginning was the CRT – the Cathode Ray Tube monitor, that hulking great brute of a box that used to sit on your desk.

You felt like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming semi - remember when you had to share your desk with one of these hulking brutes?

The CRT monitor began life as just another TV. It had no such thing as a “pixel”. The inside of the screen was covered with an amorphous layer of phosphors, which glowed when hit by a beam of electrons from a rapid-scanning “electron gun”. In order for the software running the computer to be able to address these phosphors, a “virtual” or “logical” pixel grid was created.

The “resolution” of this grid was dependent on:

The accuracy and tightness of the electron beam, and the granularity of the phosphors (usually determined by how much you were willing to pay for your display)
The number of “virtual pixels” your graphics card could manipulate per second (again, normally determined by cost).

Let’s be absolutely clear: In the CRT world, there was never such a thing as a true pixel. Even when Sony came out with its Trinitron aperture grill displays, which had Red, Green and Blue phosphor areas aligned horizontally side-by-side, these did not behave in exactly the same way as the pixels on today’s Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs).

Since phosphors “glow” when hit by the beam, there is always some “bleeding” of light to adjacent phosphors. This could actually benefit the user, especially when displaying text. Think of it as free anti-aliasing. Also the analog signal often led to mis-targeting.

Some history can explain what happened…

In 1981, IBM introduced its first color graphics card, which it named CGA (Color Graphics Adapter) It could address 640×200 logical “pixels”, and the highest color depth supported was 4-bit (16 colors). To keep the “Television” aspect ratio of the screen (4:3), the pixels were elongated, or non-square.

In 1984, IBM introduced a new EGA (Enhanced Graphics Adapter), which produced a display of 16 simultaneous colors from a palette of 64, and addressed up to 640×350 logical “pixels”.

In 1987, with the IBM PS/2 line of computers, IBM introduced the Video Graphics Array (VGA), able to address 640×480 “pixels”. (I keep putting pixels in quotes because it’s important to keep remembering that there were no “real” pixels in these displays, only logical ones…)

These “logical pixel counts” became standards. Other manufacturers cloned them. As new graphics cards came out, the figures went up – to 800 x 600, then 1024 x 768, 1280 x 1024, and so on. (Recognize those numbers?) And those standard configurations became referred to as “resolutions”, even though the term was a misnomer.

In the meantime, a new class of displays had appeared using Liquid Crystal technology. At first, these LCDs were black-on-white (in reality, dark gray on lighter gray), but by 1988 they had reached VGA resolution (Compaq SLT 286), and 256-color screens by 1993 (PowerBook 165c), progressing quickly to millions of colors and high resolutions.

And that was where it all went wrong. Manufacturers built them to the same standard “resolutions” (really, pixel counts - 1024 x 768, and so on) – because they wanted them to run on existing graphics cards.

The real tragedy for users was that computer operating systems treated them exactly like the CRTs they were replacing - as if their pixels were still only logical (and thus changeable). But they weren’t…

Unlike CRTs, LCD displays have real, actual pixels. You can see them if you examine a display with a designer’s 10x magnifying loupe. Each physical pixel is normally made up of Red, Green and Blue sub-pixels, arranged side by side. With a loupe, you can also see there’s a black line between each sub-pixel element. That’s the wiring track in the display, and it creates a hard boundary between each sub-pixel.

For a good illustration, which also explains how we used these sub-pixels to create ClearType, go here:

The wiring track emits no light, so there’s little bleed between adjacent sub-pixels. And because these pixels exist in the hardware and are not merely logical, each LCD display has its own native resolution.

Native Resolution: The actual number of physical pixels in the hardware of a display. (Again, it’s a bit of misnomer, since it’s only a pixel count and tells you nothing about pixel size or screen size).

If you address your display at anything else but native resolution, though, you’re asking for trouble.

On a CRT, since the pixels are logical-only, you could change the “resolution” either in software, or by changing your graphics card. It didn’t matter – it was just another “virtual pixel grid” for the system to compute.

But if your LCD display is, say, 1920 x 1200 pixels (like the 17” display on this MacBook Pro), the number corresponds exactly to a grid of real physical dots hard-wired into the display. It’s inherent in the hardware, and it can’t be changed by software. There really are 1920 pixels across my screen, and 1200 down. Each pixel needs to be addressed exactly. The true resolution of this display is 1/133rd of an inch, because there are 133 pixels per inch.

However, when people launched their new high-resolution displays with Windows, for example, they often found that the icons, menus, etc were too small to read comfortably. Again, there’s a cost associated with this – it’s like having to strain to read the “small print” on a document.

Unfortunately, there’s a very easy – but very wrong – way to fix this. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you go into Display Settings, and change your display “resolution” from 1920 x 1200 pixels to, say, the recognizable old favorite of 1024 x 768.

Your icons and text get bigger. But it’s a usability disaster. Your display is no longer running at its native resolution. Instead of 133ppi, you’re getting only 70.93*ppi. Everything has to be scaled, because there’s no longer 1:1 mapping between the pixel addresses your software calculates, and the actual digital addresses of the physical pixels. That means lots of rounding and fudging of the numbers.

Look at the math involved. 70.93 is a repeater - a horrible number to deal with in this context. Instead of clean, integer-only calculations, now software calculations have to be rounded to the nearest whole pixel. Scaling errors appear all over the place. Bitmap graphics become pixellated. Unlike bitmap graphics, fonts are scalable. But Cleartype – which is dependent on exact sub-pixel addressing – breaks horribly. And so on.

You get the larger menus and icons you wanted – but the cost to your eyes is terrible.

There is a second way to fix this, which you sometimes see: create the lower-pixel-count version by using fewer pixels on the screen, leaving a black frame of unused pixels around the outside. However, people feel cheated with this technique, even though it avoids scaling problems. Arguably, this would be a better solution when reducing the display resolution to match a screen projector.

The overall cost of this misunderstanding about resolution is enormous. Only a minority of computer users with high-resolution displays actually run them at native resolution. And the problems this causes are a major reason why high-resolution displays have never taken off in the way they should have.

If you know what you’re doing, you can fix this properly. First you make sure your screen is running at its native resolution, then go into Display Properties (in Windows XP) or Personalize (in Vista) and use the DPI Scaling dialog to set the Scaling (for fonts) to the real ppi of your display – instead of changing the “resolution”.

DPI Scaling Dialog in Windows Vista

Seven years ago, I had a 22” desktop LCD display (IBM T221) that handled a true 204ppi. (3840 x 2400 pixels!!!!) In those days, I had to jump through many hoops to get it to work properly. You could get it to work after a lot of tweaking of things like icon sizes, spacing between icons etc., in the Display properties/Appearance dialog. But it was a lot more trouble than any regular user would wish to take.

The real problem, though, was insurmountable. In most software, websites, line-of-business applications and so on, dimensions of graphics, dialog boxes, text windows etc. had all been specified in pixels.

Windows, most of the applications which run on it – and the Web – were built on the assumption that all displays were ~96ppi. That was true for a while – but no longer. And there’s a threshold – I think it’s somewhere around 133ppi – where software and sites built on that assumption start to break, horribly…

A bitmap graphic which was created on a 96ppi display is less than a quarter of that size when viewed on a 204ppi display (half as big in each dimension). Even worse: If dialog boxes have been created using pixel dimensions, the area provided for text is only a quarter of the size but if the text scales properly it overflows, often clipping. It’s a real mess!

My good friend Chris Wilson on the Internet Explorer team created a workaround many years ago to run IE on really high-res displays. Instead of 96ppi, he created a switch which assumed 192ppi – and then every pixel was doubled. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked – and it still works today.

One bright spot in all of this mayhem was Microsoft Office. Starting with Office 2003, the team made Office resolution-independent. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Publisher, Visio – all the Office applications have run like a dream on higher-resolution displays ever since. I have highlighted this in the past, but I’m glad to do it again, because I can never thank Office enough for grasping the nettle early, doing the right thing – and blazing a trail for others. If complex applications like these can be made resolution-independent, there’s really no excuse for anyone else.

Over recent years, Windows has been getting better about this (and I know Windows7 is another step in the improvements). At one time, Windows also assumed ~96ppi. Greg Hitchcock of the ClearType and Readability Research team at Microsoft wrote a great blog entry about this.

You’ll see from the DPI Scaling dialog that there’s now a 120dpi option as well. In addition, you can use the Custom Scaling option at the bottom of the dialog box to set Font DPI to the actual ppi of your display. But that can cause problems, too, and on this 133ppi display I’ve fallen back to 120dpi for Font Scaling.

So here’s what you do:

If you’re running an LCD display, make sure you set Windows to the native resolution of that display. Then use the Font Scaling dialog to set Font DPI to 120. There’s no point in setting your Pixel count higher than native, either, even if your graphics card supports it. You can’t create new hardware pixels using software. (Although, with ClearType, we found a way to use three times as many in the critical X-axis by addressing the RGB sub-pixels separately for text, instead of the whole pixel triad).
If you’re building software or a Website, make it resolution-independent by never using pixel dimensions. You can use percentages for dimensions like margins, point sizes for text (which the software will translate into the correct number of pixels if DPI Scaling is set correctly).
It will take a very long time for this to work its way into common practice. But it needs to happen, and you can make your applications and sites future-proof if you do it now.

I’d like to thank Greg Hitchcock and Richard Fink, who both proof-read this article, clarified some technical issues, and made helpful comments.

A Microsoft Word .doc version of this post is now available on my website.

Solar-powered computing feels so good: Next - the solar car...

2009-05-12T19:26:00.000-07:00

Before the beginning of last winter, my wife Tanya and I decided to take the plunge and go solar in our home on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. It seems crazy that on a group of islands with this much sunshine and wind, 99% of the electricity used is generated from fossil fuels - which of course have to be imported.

We began by focusing on the largest use of power for most people on the islands - hot water. We had a new solar hot water tank installed, and two solar hot water panels put on the roof. It quickly became obvious that - except perhaps once or twice a year, in winter, if there were two or three weeks of constant rain (it does happen!) - we'd never again have to use electricity to heat our water.

Now, at this point you may be saying, "It's OK for you - you're in Hawaii!". But the first solar hot water system we ever installed was in our home in Scotland in around 1983 - at the same latitude as Alaska. In summer, we got all the hot water we needed free. And if there was any sun on a winter's day (it might have been minus six degrees centigrade at night) the system would still provide about ten degrees of heat. And systems have almost certainly improved since then...

Next stage was to tackle power itself. We found an experienced contractor (who became a friend). He came out with a meter which measured the amount of sunlight we'd be able to harness, and the calculations began.

Most people installing photovoltaic (PV) generation in their homes in Hawaii opt for "Net Metering". Instead of a large bank of batteries, you use the utility company's power grid as your battery. When you're producing more than you're using, your meter winds backwards. When you're not - for example, at night - you take power from the grid.

Kauai Island Utility Co-operative (KIUC) is our local utility, and they're a bit behind the curve. Uncertain as to the overall effect of net metering on their system, they had placed a cap on the percentage of customers who could be on Net Metering.

In any event, we didn't want to instal a PV system and still be dependent on the grid. On an island like this, where the weather can change quickly, we used to have frequent but short power outages. I think that KIUC switches off power when there's a thunderstorm passing over the island. It sounds inconvenient, but it does mean that you seldom see a blown transformer - which often happens in thunderstorms on the mainland, and takes much longer to fix.

So we opted for 24 PV panels, and a bank of 16 batteries - enough battery storage to last us for a couple of days without top-up. An Outback controller, and we were set.

We've been running the system for several months now. In all that time, we've used grid power for less than two hours.

Here's a typical day. We wake up after running on batteries all night, and the indicator panel in the house tells us we have around 70-75% of power remaining. By around 8.30am (at the moment - perhaps 10am in winter), the panels kick in, and the meter tells us we're charging again.

By around noon, the system is fully charged once more, and we continue to generate excess power for the remainder of the day. Great time to do a couple of loads of washing in the machine, or run any power tools. That's also when the house begins to get hot and we need to run a fan. Doesn't matter what we use - it's all free power at this point!

The panels generate 3KwH. That may seem like we way over-engineered the system - but there's method in our madness. Once practical plug-in electric cars hit the market, we intend to buy one - then we'll never pay for fuel again. We don't drive a lot of miles anyway. The longest trip is probably from here on the North Shore to Lihue, the largest town on the island - less than 50 miles, round-trip. The system has the spare capacity to keep an electric car fully charged.

We're not power hogs. We run a couple of computers almost all day, a refrigerator, and not much else. We cook with propane. We watch DVDs at night (can't stand network or cable TV).

It wasn't cheap to install the system, and it will take a long time before we ever recover the installation cost. But money's not everything. It feels great that we've reduced our carbon footprint this much, and that we've done something to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels - and will do more.

I received an electricity bill for one of the worst months of the winter. It rained a lot last winter, and we'd had to switch on grid power for about an hour and a half. The bill said it all:

Power usage for the same period last year: 710KwH
Power usage this year: 16KwH

Wow! The State of Hawaii should be encouraging this even more! (There are already tax incentives). KIUC should be encouraging it too - because it would save us all a fortune (They recently built a new fossil-fuel generating plant to add capacity).

And the best part of all. There may have been power outages this winter - but we've never noticed. The batteries just keep on going...

Text Rendering on MacBook Pro running Internet Explorer 8 on Vista

2009-05-08T09:26:00.000-07:00

This is a screen grab of text rendered on my new MacBook Pro laptop, running Internet Explorer 8 on Microsoft Windows Vista (in a BootCamp partition).

My FB friend Alessandro Segalini asked me to post a screen shot. I originally saved this as a JPEG, then when I saw it in FB - where I posted it as a photo - I realized that the JPEG rendering was doing something funky to the color.

If you know how ClearType works, by manipulating the Red Green and Blue sub-pixel elements, you'll know that any color manipulation can do weird things.

The text on FB still looks good, but I didn't want the color weirdness (it's only slight, but I can see it's there) to give the wrong impression. So I've imported a 24-bit BMP this time. However, a thought just occurs to me: Blogger may scale this BMP to fit into its narrow column. If it does, then you won't see the real thing here either. But if you click on it, you should see it at full size in a new window.

I've posted the BMP on my website, so you can download it and look at it in Windows Paint or some other pixel-level graphics tool in which you can be sure nothing funky's being done to the original.

I'm going to write a lot more about running Windows on this great Macintosh. The 17" screen and 133ppi display are terrific.

Dell shipped 133ppi displays about 12 years ago, of course, and has shipped displays as high as 147ppi in laptops ten years ago (Inspiron 7500 or 7800 - I forget which). But the brightness and clarity of the Mac display are something else. I opted for the high-gloss, glass screen rather than the anti-glare one. So my screen looks like a giant iPhone turned on its side...

However, neither Apple nor Microsoft - nor many websites, including Blogger - uses the screen real estate that's available (1920 x 1200 pixels).

133ppi is definitely a threshold. Once your display is beyond that, then "traditional" websites - those designed under the outdated assumption that all displays are ~96ppi - start to break all over the place.

Windows Vista allows me to set the Font DPI to the actual screen DPI. But when I do it, websites really start going crazy. It's not the fault of Windows, which is doing the right thing. It's the fault of the applications and the website creators.

I've had to fall back to 120ppi as my Font DPI because of this problem.

This underlying assumption of ~96ppi is at the heart of many issues. The assumption has been invalid for many years now, and the problem will get worse as more and more high-res devices and displays appear.

It really is time to make computing resolution-independent.

Leaving Microsoft: The Journey Continues...

2009-05-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s official now. I’m leaving Microsoft.

It's time to begin the next stage of a mission that began for me in the early 1980s - when I realized that computers were about to change the publishing industry radically and forever. I helped to drive the desktop publishing revolution that changed high-quality printing and made it accessible to anyone with a personal computer.

I guess the second stage began when I first saw hypertext in 1985, while writing the user manual for Guide, the first Macintosh hypertext authoring program (those were the days when software needed a thick printed manual).

Hypertext was supposed to replace paper. But everyone promoting it had forgotten the one basic flaw in the reasoning – reading from the screen was so bad that everyone would still print information in order to read it.

The journey brought me from Scotland to the Pacific Northwest, to work at Microsoft, which I believed was the one company in the world best-placed to lead the transition from reading on paper to reading on a screen.

It may sound trite, but so many millions of people worldwide use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office that it's a truism: Change Windows and Office, and you change the world.

There are probably a billion people worldwide with ClearType on their PCs and other improvements like the onscreen reading view in Word.

I've had the opportunity to work with many clever folks at Microsoft. Together, we have driven a lot of change. I want to publicly thank the ClearType team at Microsoft, most of whom I’ve worked with since I joined the company over 14 years ago. They drank the Kool-Aid before anyone, when they worked for me in Microsoft's Typography group. Back in 1995, we produced a plan together which focused us on reading from the screen. The Verdana and Georgia fonts were the first fruit of that work. And they're still believers.

I’d like to thank Charles Torre of Microsoft's Channel9. It has been a huge success, and it has always been a delight to work with him. If you want to see Bill Hill videos, Channel9 is the place to go. Together, they've had hundreds of thousands of views.

It has been a privilege to know and work with all at Channel9, and I hope we’ll stay in contact.

The job of making the screen as comfortable to read as paper is not yet completed. I've come to believe that it is the development of Web standards, and standards-based rendering, which will take us the rest of the way.

There’s huge potential. Two trillion pages are still printed in the US alone, every year, and that’s an enormous waste of energy and resources.

For some time, I have been preparing for leaving Microsoft by setting up my network and communications. You’ll find me on FaceBook and LinkedIn, as well as on my website and this blog.

As you all know, I’m a Man With A Mission. I have no intention of becoming a beach bum. I always said that I would probably go back to writing, which I did professionally for almost as long as I worked in the software industry. I’ll continue with my blog and website.

I’ve become convinced over the past couple of years that no one company or browser will make the transition to reading on screen happen. I still believe in eBooks. Amazon has definitely seized the lead there, by providing the two things which were both essential to success – a device and a bookstore.

I have some other ideas I’m not yet ready to talk about. And of course I'm available as a consultant.

I’m facing the future with what is probably the right mix of fear and excitement. It has always felt like this is destined to happen, it’s a lot bigger than me, and I’m not in control.

In the past, what seemed like the worst thing that could happen has often turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.

Reading on Screen IS The Future of Reading. People thought I was mad when I tried to tell them that back in the 1980s and 1990s. Now we all spend hours every day, reading from a screen. We've come a long way.

But we still have promises to keep, and miles to go before we sleep.

Kindle: Disappointing for reading non-fiction - textbook version soon?

2009-04-30T20:08:00.000-07:00

As you all know by now, I'm a big fan of the Kindle 2. My experience with reading standard, text-only fiction has convinced me that it's a winner.

However, it's clear that Amazon still has a lot of work to do if they want the Kindle to be used also to read non-fiction. A rumor this week suggested they might be planning to tackle that market next.

When I got my second Kindle 2 (you'll remember I lost the first one), I decided to re-read one of my all-time favorite non-fiction books on it - Jared Diamond's amazing "Guns, Germs and Steel", which chronicles the history of the human race and explains how it was the development of food production and domestication of animals in Eurasia which were the main factors in the European colonization of large parts of the world.

This was the major factor in the virtual extermination of native peoples by epidemic diseases like smallpox and measles - all of which had jumped the species boundary to humans from domesticated animals, and to which Europeans had developed some immunity due to thousands of years of exposure, while peoples like Native Americans and Hawaiians had their populations reduced to less than five percent by successive waves of disease.

Anyway, it's a great and fascinating book. Diamond's chronicling of the birth and spread of writing and printing - which were also stimulated by the same societal changes, and fostered by the ability of food production techniques which replaced hunter-gatherer lifestyles - has been of great value to me in my own studies of reading.

One of the most valuable features of the book is its series of tables and maps - and it was here that Kindle definitely let me down.

Kindle doesn't scale the text in tables so it all fits on a page, thus destroying the ability to compare at a glance lots of related facts.

I found that sometimes switching the text size down, below the size at which I can read comfortably, allowed me to fit the whole table on a "page". But usually it didn't, with the result that the tables were not quite useless, but very greatly reduced in value.

Same problem with maps and graphics. I don't know what Amazon did to get the graphics into their .azw format, but I'm guessing they were scanned as pictures. This of course means the text gets blurred. But also, the graphics end up gray and hard to read.

One thing I did notice - they seemed, just for a fleeting instant, to display much better when XOR'd as the Kindle first refreshed the page. Maybe Amazon should try this. But they certainly need to improve the handling of both tables and graphics to turn Kindle into a device on which you'd happily read non-fiction.

It's a pity. The Kindle weighs much less and is easier to handle than Diamond's printed book.

I'm also starting to hit a problem in which many of the books I want to re-read - and be able to carry around with me - just aren't available.

I'd like to re-read William Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" - a fascinating account of how a madman can make a whole nation insane, and a book everyone needs to read in case we forget how it can happen.

Another favorite author of mine is William Manchester. I'd like to re-read the two-part biography of Winston Churchill, "The Last Lion".

"Reich" and the two volumes of "Lion" together weigh several pounds, with thousands of pages. They're heavy and bulky to carry (especially when traveling), and together must make a stack about six inches thick. They're very awkward to read in bed.

In short, books like this are PERFECT candidates for purchasing and reading on a device like the Kindle. But despite being best-sellers, they are not available...

This week there was a rumor (or leak) on the Web that Amazon would announce a larger-format Kindle for reading textbooks etc. This would be a very smart move. Imagine the cost savings if textbooks (which must be regularly updated) went digital. And the relief of the ten-year-olds who would no longer have to struggle to school with a huge backpack, or a travel suitcase with wheels...

Kindle: Becoming An Expensive Way To Read...

2009-04-21T12:17:00.000-07:00

OK, I know this is my own fault...

I love the Kindle eBook device, and the ability it gives me to carry many books around with me, and buy them wirelessly, anywhere.

But it's starting to look like a very expensive option. My first Kindle died, as readers of this blog will know, after I accidentally knocked it into the bath at home.

Although expensive, it wasn't deeply mourned - since it gave me an excuse to go out and buy the much-improved Kindle 2, (which I'd have been tempted to do, anyway).

K2 happens to fit very neatly into a 6" Ziplok sandwich bag, almost certainly averting the possibility of a watery grave similar to the one which claimed my first Kindle.

However, I was at an all-day meeting last week, and I was showing it off to a few people at my table. Then I received a phone call which meant I had to cut hurriedly out of that meeting and go to another one.

I had a lot of meetings last week. So it was two days later before I noticed my Kindle wasn't in my backpack with the laptop I'd disconnected and stuffed into it when the call came.

I've been checking with receptionists, security, etc. - but it hasn't turned up so far.

So now I face a hard choice. In order to read the 70-or-so books I've already purchased, do I shell out the price of a third Kindle? (Which would bring my Kindle outlay so far up to over $1000!).

Kindle, or a device like it, would be great for students. But I'd suspect there would be a fairly high device casualty rate.

I recently saw data from a "Kindle teardown" which put the actual hardware cost of the device at $185. When you add to that the cost of the free wireless networking support, etc, it's clear Amazon probably isn't making much profit on each device. Which means there's not a lot of opportunity for future price drops, unless perhaps sales really take off and there's a chance to cut unit cost by increasing manufacturing volume.

Will I buy another Kindle? Oh, probably. I'll put it down to the cost of being an "early adopter" - and be a lot more careful about where I set it down in future...

Three out of four major Web browsers now support FullScreen mode

2009-04-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

I'm grateful to Richard Fink for tipping me off to the fact that Beta 2 of Google's Chrome browser now supports a FullScreen mode (keyboard shortcut F11) in which you can make all browser chrome disappear, leaving only the content you want to read.

It may seem trivial to you, but it's clear to me from all the experiments I've done over many years that when you really want to read something, anything which appears on the screen other than the actual content is a distraction.

You can't help it - none of us can. We're all Homo sapiens Version 1.0, with a hunter-gatherer perception system which uses foveal vision to read, but whose peripheral vision remains highly sensitive to data - especially from the extreme left and right edges of our visual field.

Think about it. Anything appearing in those areas has the potential to be a serious threat to our safety in the natural environment in which our perception developed. Our brains have developed a hair-trigger for data appearing here, so that our "fight or flight" response can be tripped in order for us to act quickly enough to avoid danger.

The problem with FullScreen today, though, is that almost no content exists which has been optimized for it. Full Screen on the laptop on which I'm writing this means 1440 x 900 pixels. On your screen, it could be 1024 x 768, 1920 x 1200, or some other configuration.

Even worse, the pixels themselves are not absolute measurements. They could be 1/96th of an inch square, 1/147th of an inch square, even 1/208th of an inch square. What that means is that any area described in pixel dimensions by a designer assuming 96ppi could actually end up being only one-quarter of the size on someone else's machine!

This is why I'm so insistent on the need for adaptive layout on the Web. We need a layout system which:

Uses absolute, not relative, measurements.
Interrogates the operating system and determines actual screen size and pixel pitch.
Translates the absolute measurements of the original design into pixel dimensions for the actual display being used.
Determines the optimum number of columns for best readability on that particular display given the text-size the user prefers for reading.
Has much more granularity than today's browser "Text size" options (you should be able to pick 10 point or 11 point for body text, for example).
Lays out the content accordingly - in pages, not in a bottomless scrolling window.

It all sounds like a tall order, and a lot of work. But it isn't rocket-science, and much of it has already been done in proprietary formats like Windows Presentation Foundation and Adobe AIR. It's time we had the same thing on the Web.

FullScreen support is only a small part of what's needed. But it's another brick in the wall. I hope Safari will get on board soon. It should be easy, since it's using the same Webkit as Chrome...

Distributed Proofreaders: What your work could look like if it was paginated...

2009-04-07T10:40:00.000-07:00

The Dance of Death created by Distributed Proofreaders for Project Gutenberg, with the browser in Full Screen mode.

I'm indebted to Juliet Sutherland for commenting on this blog, and especially for pointing me towards the work being done on books for Project Gutenberg by Distributed Proofreaders.

As Juliet points out, their aims are not exactly the same as mine. They are trying to "make the best of the Web as it is today", while I and some others argue that the way to make a lot of things better on the Web is to expand what you can do on it.

Readers of this blog will know I'm a proponent of being able to do adaptive pagination on the Web - paginated content whose layout adapts to fit the screen on which it's being viewed.

People like Joe Clark (actually, I don't think there are any other people like Joe) would have you think that I'm a heretic, who wants to "turn the Web into outmoded print layouts.

That's not what I'm advocating at all; what we have on the Web today should stay - but there are better alternatives for many types of "reading" content, and those should be added to what we already have, thus expanding the range of possibilities.

Then people can make up their minds what they prefer, instead of having to work within silly, outmoded constraints like "Web pages always have to scroll in a bottomless window.

As I've said elsewhere, that particular constraint exists only because the software engineers building the first publicly-available Web browser, NCSA Mosaic, took the easy shortcut of displaying Web content in a bottomless scrolling window in order to avoid the harder layout problem of pagination. It's become part of the fabric of the Web, and it's high time it was questioned.

Distributed Proofreaders has done a great job on books - working within the constraints of the Web today. Juliet pointed me to "The Dance of Death", a 16th Century book by Holbein, with fanastic woodcuts, as an example of how their work can adapt to different screens.

Here are some thoughts on opening up the book and examining it and its markup, and some ideas on where I'd like to see this type of content be able to go in the future.

None of this should be construed as a criticism of what DP has done (although I do have minor niggles like the use of "inches" and 'feet' marks instead of proper typographer's quotes). This DP book has been proofread and set with great care and thought, and if it's a typical example, then DP is to be congratulated on a job well done.

Since DP doesn't specify typefaces or fonts in the books it does, at first all the text appeared in Times New Roman - the default font in most browsers for pages that don't specify fonts.

Now, TNR was a great print face in its day. It's not very nice on screen, because it has a small x-height. And it really does look old and tired. Part of that is no doubt because it has been the default font for documents in word-processing software for decades. It has, not to put too fine a point on it, been beaten to death. But that aside, it does look "old-fashioned" - and not in a nice way...

The first thing I did was change my default font in Internet Explorer 8 to Cambria. Instant improvement! Cambria is the best serif face for reading on screen, no question, and this book looks great in it. (I'd choose Calibri as my favorite sans serif). Another way to do this would be to switch CSS stylesheets (which Internet Explorer now supports, since Beta 2 of IE8.

Incidentally, Juliet had the gripe that many of the problems DP faces were the result of trying to get pages to work with Internet Explorer. I hope that will become a "gripe of the past" now that IE8 has shipped using Web-standards rendering by default.

Next thing was to play around with browser width, by re-sizing my browser window. As Juliet points out, the layout adapts very well to changes in browser width, which would equate to different screen sizes.

However, on a larger, modern laptop display, there's so much unused screen either side of the browser window that the "book" gets lost. There's too much distraction either side - even if it's only a large area of unused white screen.

And while the content adapts to width very well, it's still a less-than-optimal scrolling read...

The Dance of Death in a narrower browser window - still a long way short of the immersive experience of reading a printed book.

Since Juliet sent me this link yesterday, I've been experimenting with different layouts to create an improved, paginated version of this book, just to show what it could look like. But this morning an email arrived from my colleague Mike Duggan in Ireland, with a really nice paginated layout.

Mike's a visual guy, a great typographer, and tends to do his mockups in Windows Paint. So this is just a .jpg. But it's easy to see how it could be created on the Web, using a CSS stylesheet plus multicolumn and hyphenation Javascripts.

Doesn't it look much better than most content of this type we see on the Web? With a layout like this, in Full Screen mode, you could truly have an immersive book-reading experience.

Mike Duggan's mockup of a paginated layout for The Dance of Death

What do we need to be able to do this on the Web? Well, the biggest obstacle is that today you'd have to paginate it manually, which is not only time-consuming, but means you have to decide upfront on a fixed size - and that's terrible.

With AJAX, you could get the window size from the operating system, and use that not only to calculate the optimum number of columns, but the depth of the columns in which the content would flow.

You really don't want to be dependent on Javascripts for multi-column and hyphenation. I've talked about the problems of a DOM-based multicolumn .js elsewhere in this blog. Those functions are much better done with the layout and composition engines of the browsers - which are much more sophisticated.

You'd like to be able to just create a Master page, then hand off the actual setting to the browser - whatever browser the reader is using - and have create as many "new pages" as it needs to place all the content.

You'd want graphics to be scaled to fit a grid determined by the AJAX calculation. That grid would be based on multiples of body-text line-height - and would change if the reader, for example, wanted or needed to read in larger type.

There would be common elements for every page. You'd need to increment page numbers. The "virtual pages" created would need to be temporarily stored in a cache somewhere so the reader could navigate the "book".

There are all kinds of details like this which would need to be thought through. And there would certainly be HTML and CSS standards developments which could help.

There are issues like the one pointed out by Richard Fink, of how you index and reference in a book which has different page numbers for different readers. (My suggestion for this is to take a leaf out of the Bible, and refer to passages by Chapter and Verse. Amazon's Kindle uses "Location numbers", which works but is pretty ugly).

That's why this kind of innovation shouldn't be done in any one browser. It needs to be a collaboration involving them all. It has to become an extension to existing Web standards.

For example, the CSS3 standard for multiple columns allows you to specify columns either as an integer number - which means column width floats, or by specifying a column width - in which case the number of columns floats. It would be nice to be able to specify upper and lower limits for column width, so you'd get smooth reflow as window size changed.

I know my own personal ideal (and that of Mike Duggan and another expert colleague, Geraldine Wade) is to use my browser in Full Screen mode. But that may not be what everyone wants, and they should be free to choose what they prefer. If our way works better for them, that's what they'll end up using.

There's a lot of work needed to make this happen. But as far back as 1984, I saw an unknown software application - running at that time only on the Apple Macintosh - which would let you create a Master Page grid for any size of page, then allow you to autoflow content into it. The application would automatically create as many new pages as it needed to place all your content.

That little application was called PageMaker, and it created an entirely new market for software, fonts, printers etc. called DeskTop Publishing (it was the era of the capital letter in the middle of words).

Is anyone really trying to tell me that the Web can't be made capable of doing what was easily possible a quarter of a century ago? We need it to become a publishing platform capable of the highest-quality layout and typography people can imagine.

I have an OnScreen Reading discussion group over on FaceBook where anyone is welcome to get together and talk about all of this. Ultimately, though, I'd like to see this discussion take place under the auspices of the W3C or the CSS working group. Maybe it's already happening, and I just don't know about it...

Word of warning: I'm not interested in flame wars over on FaceBook. People do need to be able to argue their point of view, if it's done in the spirit of moving forward - but not as adversaries, scoring points. I'm keeping myself as the only admin on that group, so I can throw off anyone I judge is getting out of hand.

Experiments in Web Readability 3: A News Magazine Feature

2009-04-03T12:30:00.000-07:00

Before: The start of a feature article on the Newsweek Website

After: The same first page - but laid out for readability. Don't forget to put your browser into FullScreen view (F11 - if you have one of the two browsers that support it...)

My next project was one that's really close to my heart. A few weeks ago, I came across a GREAT article in the online edition of Newsweek about the 2008 Presidential Campaign. It was full of terrific background on the candidates, the way they and their teams thought and acted, and the various phases that each of their campaigns went through before Obama's victory.

The writing was outstanding. But the readability was absolutely AWFUL!!!! It was a struggle to plough my way through what should have been an amazing reading experience, with well-written, engaging content.

So first I tried to analyze what was wrong, then began experimenting. I knew I couldn't do it exactly as I wanted with today's Web technology. But I knew instantly that I could make it a lot better.

The first thing that's wrong is the same problem with every news site I've seen - it's just far, far too busy. In the rush to become "Webby", they've created pages with columns of hyperlinks off to each side, videos you can click on, etc - and in the process they've broken up the writing in horrible ways, making reading a disjointed experience, unlike the printed Newsweek, which you can sit down and read at your leisure, soaking in the words like floating in a nice hot bath....

It's worth noting that Newsweek's pages have TEN PAGES of script and coding before the first content even appears in the HTML!

If you add to that the distractions of Web browser chrome, you're really stacking the odds against an acceptable reading experience.

Now I've seen and tried so-called "bookmarklets" which generally use a Javascript to strip out only the text (or text and "significant" graphics) from a Web page or article to give you a "readable" version. Every one I've seen so far "throws the baby out with the bathwater" and turns what should be a great visual experience into a boring one. Usually you end up with nothing but text, no graphics, a layout that uses only the center of your display, etc.

It's like using a flamethrower to treat an outbreak of acne...

The other big problem I see in news websites is that in the rush to replace revenue from print ads with Web ads, they've stuck really intrusive ads in really instrusive places.

You get stuff that flashes at you. Our Homo sapiens version 1.0 perception system treats movement at a Priority0 interrupt. We have no choice but to pay attention, because movement to a hunter-gatherer equals either Threat, or Lunch...

Trying to read when that's going on is like trying to read a book in a cageful of lions. For more on this, read my Paper, The Magic of Reading.

Advertisers need to realize that catching our attention in this way is totally counter-productive. Yes, we have to look. But we deeply resent being distracted in this way. Modern humans need their attention to be wooed - clubbing them over the head went out with the cavemen!

The last thing you ever want to do is buy anything advertised in this way.

Don't get me wrong. As a newspaperman, I'm a realist. If people aren't paying for Web content, then advertising revenue has to be able to support these news-gathering organizations.

Advertising doesn't need to be distractive or intrusive, just because it's on the Web. People buy issues of the printed Vogue magazine as much for the adverts as for the other content. The adverts look great! They don't distract, because I have the option to page past them if I want. If they're attractive enough, I won't - and a whole multi-billion dollar print advertising industry was built on that premise.

I've worked on a couple of online projects at Microsoft in which we've created really great adverts. I've already spoken about adaptive adverts in the New York Times Reader. Those change to fill the available space as content itself reflows adaptively when either the window is resized, or the reader changes the type size (which they need to be able to do).

In another project, a colleague commissioned an agency to build onscreen ads which were so much BETTER than anything you'd ever seen in print. And they can have sound, be interactive, be animated, or contain video. Just as long as you can turn off the action when you want to focus on reading.

So it's not that onscreen advertising is evil - it's just that no-one's doing it right yet. I included an advertisement for Rolex watches, taken from the Newsweek website, in the second page of my version of the article. The original was actually animated: the watch hand swept around the dial. That might not bother me when I was reading. If it did, I ought to be able to click to turn the animation off and on.

Second page of the Newsweek article, with advertisement. Ads ought to be able to span one, two or three columns - or even be full screen.

So I started playing around with various layouts. I liked the navigation strip Newsweek had used, with the "Secrets of the 2008 Campaign" across it, and links to the various sections. That worked very well with the kind of navigation I've shown you in my previous experiments. All it needed was to add page turn buttons (and link them to the Left and Right arrow buttons on my keyboard).

I haven't made the strip interactive yet, because I've only done one section of the article. But you can see how it would be done: make each of the headings - Highlights, Chapter 1, Chapter 2 ,etc - a "hot spot" with a link to the relevant first page of each section...

Again, I decided on pages of 1440 x 900 pixels. I don't like fixed pages, but there's no easy way (no way at all, really) to get exactly what I want today without using them (sigh!).

I started doing some mockups, and sent them to colleagues. Mike Duggan came up with a great layout, although I modified it and he may not agree my modifications are better. He had the same four narrow columns, but I found his proposal to set the text ragged right gave an effect which was too distracting in that column measure, and so I made the body text justified instead.

If you use justified text on your website, then you really need to use hyphenator.js to hyphenate it - otherwise you end up with awful word spacing, especially in narrower columns.

I used another javascript to do multiple-column layout. I've mentioned before, it uses the DOM, doesn't understand anything smaller than a paragraph, and therefore is challenged when it comes to breaking longer paragraphs at the bottom of columns.

For that reason, I apologize to the Newsweek journalists who wrote the content. I've had to chop up their longer paragraphs to try to overcome this technical problem. Doing this job properly would involve using the much more sophisticated layout and composition engine of the browser itself - which is how it should happen in the future.

Remember, I'm stuck with using tricks to overcome the limitations of the Web today. And trying to influence the Web of tomorrow in the process.

The body text is Cambria, my favorite for sustained reading. All the fonts I used are embedded using Embedded OpenType. The font objects were all created with subsets which contain only the Basic Latin character set to keep the size down. Means I never need to create new ones, and those font objects are available on my site for every one of the pages I create.

Only Internet Explorer supports EOT so far. If you're running another browser, you'll need the fonts on your system (if you're running Windows Vista, Office2007, MacOffice2008, or have installed the Office 2007 compatibility pack, they'll be there).

The main heading, "Obama" is 72 point Calibri in a weight of 700, with an upper-case transform. You can find all of these in the CSS stylesheet I created: http://www.billhillsite.com/newsweek2.css

A word of warning. My stylesheet "grew organically" and was not really methodically planned; I just re-used earlier ones and modified them. So there are almost certainly styles in there I'm not using in this publication. It needs a good cleanup...

The toughest part about doing this project has been the fact that I have to manually paginate, since there's no browser which supports pagination of flowing text content today (I know, you can paginate paragraphs from a search engine or database - but you can't paginate a book or a magazine).

I've properly paginated only pages 1 and 2 so far. I need to go into subsequent pages, add some more graphics, sub-headings, pull-quotes, and ads to break up the text in a nice way. I also need to go in and split up the longer paragraphs. And I think I need to create at least one more page to hold all the overflow text which will result from that. So it's still a work in progress.

But I think what I've done so far is a big improvement on the same article on Newsweek's website. I hope you agree.

I really want to work with Web designers, the browser teams and W3C standards folks (both HTML and CSS) and others, to make sure that what I'm forced to achieve by trickery today becomes really easy and absolutely routine on the Web of tomorrow.

Experiments in Web Readability 2: A Blog

2009-04-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

The first page of my Readable Blog. Click on each of the graphics in this article to go to the original page on my website. You'll want Internet Explorer 8 to view the embedded fonts properly.

My first full-scale Web Readability experiment - a book - showed me that you could produce text on Web pages which people could read for long, sustained periods.

It wasn't a simple process, since it involved a lot of manual editing to get column- and page-breaks right. It meant you had to create a separate web page for each page of the book - which of course meant you had to duplicate all the header code, code to draw the title bar, navigation buttons etc. on each of the pages.

That's wasteful! But until Web browsers' layout engines support full pagination, there is no other way as far as I can see. Ideally, what you want is a kind of "Master Page", which includes all repeating elements. I think this can be done using CSS; I plan to try some experiments in this area.

However, there's still no way to have your browser flow the content until your "page" fills, then create a new one, and so on until all the content's placed. This is what software like the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) - based New York Times Reader does - and we need this functionality on the Web. It will mean that not only will Web browsers have to evolve, but we'll need new (or improved) Web standards, too.

Anyway, that's in the future. I wanted to see what I could do today.

For my second project, I chose a Blog. Blogging has made publishing content easy. But the resulting output is ugly and hard to read.

Why can't a blog be as readable as a well-laid-out magazine? There's absolutely no reason, except the technology has not yet evolved to support it.

Today, blogging software (like Blogger, or LiveSpaces) pretends that it's giving you a multi-column layout. But that's only true for the first screenful or two. If a blog contains longer articles, then as you scroll down you end up reading the same old, boring, wasteful single-column - with large sections of the screen either side of it completely unused.

That's the main reason I chose white text on a black background from among Blogger's layout options. I'd prefer black text on white - but when there's just one narrow column of text in a vast area of white, the screen's punching far too much light at the reader. A page of printed text:

Is reflecting light, not transmitting it, and

Has an overall, even "grayness" because it's generally filled with text (typographers call this "color")

Ideally, the Web needs true multicolumn layout. And, of course, you can't have that without pagination - it makes no sense at all to have to scroll down to the bottom of a column, then all the way back up to the top of the next one in order to continue reading.

Multicolumn layout and pagination makes a blog much more readable

When I began my first experiments, my friend and colleague Mike Duggan designed a "masthead" for my blog. It was originally laid out in a print publishing application; I wanted to see if it could be replicated using Web standards markup.

Another colleague, Chris Wilson, managed to recreate it.I tweaked his code a little until I was happy with the final look. Problem 1 solved - a consistent look to all the pages, using CSS for the text specs. I also used the same "Forward-Backward" buttons I'd used in the book - because again the pages were designed to be read in FullScreen mode, so the pages and not the browser would contain the navigation.

(Interesting digression here)

Although the buttons were better than browser chrome, it was still a bit of a pain to have to reach for the mouse, move the pointer up to the button and click. Somehow it seemed to detract from the smoothness of page-turns that you want, especially in a sustained read, like a book.

Just this morning, though, my friend and colleague Greg Hitchcock asked me if it was possible to have keystrokes (left and right arrows, for instance) do the job instead.

I emailed the Internet Explorer team and Alex Kuang sent me a script which allows you to assign keystrokes. I copied it, saved it as a Javascript with the name keynav.js, and copied it to my website, http://www.billhillsite.com/

Then I edited the pages of the book to add a reference to the script, and two fragments to the existing "next page" and "previous page" code. Now you can use left and right arrows to page through the book. Try it at http://www.billhillsite.com/mabinogion.htm

I haven't put these page turns in my readable blog yet, but I'll do that over the next day or two. Turning pages this way on a laptop just feels so much more natural!

(End of digression)

Back to my readable blog. I set about laying out the pages using the ClearType optimized fonts we shipped with Windows Vista, Office2007 and MacOffice2008. I used Internet Explorer's Embedded OpenType capability to do that.

I picked up the same multicolumn Javascript I'd used for the book, and used CSS to set the number of columns to 3, to give a more magazine-like layout.

I used CSS to create a Drop Capital at the start of the main story on each page. CSS drop caps are a bit of a pain. There's a lot of trial and error involved, and you still can't do true "typographic" drop caps. The CSS working group needs to get some eminent typographers like Robert Bringhurst involved in defining how this kind of functionality should work.

That said, the drop cap I managed to create (with a lot of help from Chris) still looked better than the normal "vanilla" beginning of a paragraph of text.

Then it was down to writing the text and adding graphics to create each page of my blog as a separate web page. Getting the column breaks right still took a lot of work because of the lack of granularity in the multicolumn Javascript.

One thing you should note about these pages is that I also took a lot of care to make certain the baselines of text were aligned in adjacent columns. That definitely adds a huge feeling of stability to any layout. It's one of those magical typographic attributes; without that, something will feel very wrong and unbalanced about any multicolumn page, and unless you're experienced you won't even know what's missing. You can just feel a page "settle down" once you get this right.

To achieve this rhythm, you need to make sure that everything on the page - all your different styles, the depth of every graphic, etc, is based on multiples of the line-height of the body text.

I did this manually. But there's JQuery code to do it on the site of my former colleague, Fil Fortes. Find it here.

There's still a major problem with this kind of layout. Because multicolumn requires pagination, and there's no such thing as a "fixed page size" on the Web - because readers will access sites on a wide range of different displays - this kind of layout will need to become adaptive in order to work everywhere.

The WPF-based NYT reader does this, changing the number of columns and the sizing of pictures, etc, to fit the window in which it's being displayed. We really need this technology on the Web. Otherwise we're still doing things the way information designers have worked for 35,000 years - since they first painted on cave walls.

A page from my readable blog with graphics showing how effective adaptive layout can be.

I hope you'll agree, these layouts are much better than the poor options blogging tools allow us today.

Now, don't get me wrong - the blogging tools of today have democratized publishing in a way we could never have dreamed of when I started work as a newsman back in the 1960s. They make it possible to write content really easily, add graphics and links, post it, deal with comments and all kinds of other stuff.

But they're all still in their infancy, and need to learn the lessons it took the world of print 550 years to absorb...