While I haven’t had the opportunity to use the new/quite old @font-face rule on any real projects, I have done some quick tests, seen many great examples, and even reverse engineered TypeKit to see how they “securely” distribute licensed font libraries. @font-face gives me a lot of hope for the future of design and typography on the web. One day we’ll look back on the days when we were restricted to Times, Arial, Verdana, and Georgia as a nightmare that lasted far too long. The current batch of browsers do a decent job of supporting the @font-face rule, and they will only get better. Head over to Zoltan Hawryluk’s write-up to see a side by comparison of how the fonts are rendered in the major browsers, as well as an in depth look at how to use the rule and a list of great resources.

A few years ago I was thinking about colour and how strange it would be to be colour blind, or never see colour at all. Then I started thinking about how you would communicate colour to someone who had never seen it, you can’t say “it looks like what an orange tastes like”, that would make no sense. After I was done abusing my brain with those thoughts, I took it one step further and started wondering if everyone sees colour the same way. Take a strawberry for example, I see it as red, but you might see it as what I would call purple, but you would still call it red, because that’s how you see it, neither of us would be wrong because that’s how our brains interpret that colour. But, how would you be able tell if someone else sees colour differently than you? We both say the strawberry is red, and we just assume we see the colour the same way.

As a front-end web developer most of the development I do is done in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. As the JavaScript widgets and applications that I build become increasingly more complex, the need for solid JavaScript framework becomes all that much more important. You certainly don’t need a JavaScript framework or library to build a rock solid application, however using one will make it much faster, painless, and enjoyable. For years I’ve been using the MooTools framework and before that the MooFX libraries to help build rich interactive JavaScript applications and interface widgets. I’ve used jQuery on occasion when I had to due to client requirements, but it’s always left me wanting more. While jQuery makes it dead easy to find and manipulate DOM elements and do some nice easy animations, it doesn’t do much beyond that. I’ve never really been able to articulate exactly why I prefer MooTools over jQuery, however Aaron Newton has done an excellent job with a very detailed and fair comparison of jQuery and Mootools at: jqueryvsmootools.com.

I personally hope the MooTools community grows to a size comparable to jQuery’s. We need a helpful, friendly, and loyal community to spread the word about MooTools and help other developers, at any skill level, understand not only MooTools better, but JavaScript itself.

A couple months ago I started researching different ways that we could replace our current TV setup. We were subscribed to our cable company’s top cable package with HD channels, PVR, and hundreds of channels we never watched. Essentially we were paying $80 a month to record TV shows that we would watch days or even weeks later,  and watch old re-runs that we had seen dozens of times that we put on as background noise when there was “nothing on”. The PVR was a total disaster even when it did work properly, which it rarely did. If you set the PVR to record “Lost” on ABC’s HD channel, the next week it would be listed as “Lost HD” or “Lost HD (5.1)” and wouldn’t get recorded due to the variation in the listing name.  I won’t even get into the abysmal user interface that the team at work analyzed in great detail in the Teehan+Lax PVR Report.  We were paying almost $1000 a year to watch old reruns of Friends and use an unreliable, out-of-date, and terribly clunky piece hardware/software to record our favourite TV shows. This was totally ridiculous.

A couple months ago I was looking at our phone bill and realized that we were paying 3 phones bills for 2 people that hardly ever use the phone. Something about this wasn’t adding up right. We tried to think of a valid reason why we needed to keep the $30 a month landline when we both have cell phones. We couldn’t come up with any, except for the fact that sometimes we just don’t hear our cell phones at home. Sometimes I’ll be upstairs and my cell phone will be on vibrate downstairs, or we’ll be watching TV and we forgot our cell phone in our jacket pocket downstairs. This reason alone kept us tied to our landline. The only solution we could think of would be some sort of bluetooth ringer that would ring with our cell phones, this idea lead us to find the XLink Bluetooth Gateway.