mindgarden

The video from the “Developing With HTML5” session at Google IO is finally online. Check out t the CSS3 demo at 27:30 to see the Font API in action.

Since we released the Google font directory last wednesday the response has be nothing short of amazing. Twitter was going crazy and everyone from CNN to Mr. Zeldman himself have reported about it.

What’s especially great to see is that people are already using it on their websites and what’s more, creating plugins and howtos about it. These are just a few:

• CSS-Tricks features a nice interview with Raph Levien from the webfonts team

• Design Shack have a detailed tutorial on their site how to use the API

• Paul Irish has a more detailed look at the API and created an awesome Webfont Loader demo page

• My fellow Google webmaster Melissa Louie has a great page on her website demoing what you can do with webfonts and some CSS3

• There’s already a WordPress plugin

• ...and a Drupal Module as well!

• Also there’s a little github project that let’s you change the fonts on your page using some jQuery

And if you’re not a reading person and would rather sit back and watch a video about the font directory you can do that as well:

I have been looking at some open source fonts for font embedding with @font-face lately. A good place to for good OFL licenced fonts is The League of Movable Type

To be able to test their excellent fonts and how they behave in different browsers I’ve built a little Specimen Browser using Tim Brown’s fantastic Web Font Specimen and some lines of JavaScript.

Just open up the Web Font Specimen Browser in the browser you want to test in and select a font from the drop-down. Without a selection it will default to Georgia and you can test all system fonts too by adding a ‘font’ parameter to the URL like http://marctobiaskunisch.com/WebFontSpecimenBrowser/?font=arial

This is work in progress and my plan is to add more fonts from other sources as well.

Here’s the link to the Web Font Specimen Browser again.

Newspaper companies are having a hard time adjusting to a world in which people use the internet. And especially since Rupert Murdoch accused Search Engines of stealing their content and announced that he would make people pay to read News Corp. content there is a lot of discussion about how the future of the news industry will look like.

Yesterday Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google posted his view on things in an article on Wall Street Journal , envisioning the future to look like this:

It’s the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load.

Apparently newspaper companies are indeed working on that future right now. Time Inc. have just released a demo of a tablet-targeted version of Sports Illustrated which gives a good impression of how they want to justify taking money for content in the digital age:

Also, the New York Times have recently released their Times Skimmer which is an alternative Interface for their headlines. What they’ve come up with is really nice I think. It is especially nice to see that they did not implement it in a proprietary format like Flash or Silverlight but instead used open standards like HTML and CSS (with some nice HTML5 and CSS3 highlights sprinkled on top). And they’re using @font-face through Typekit as well.

I did my presentation about font embedding using @font-face yesterday on BarCamp London 7. Here are the slides: