Check out this awesome Google Tech Talk on Dasher:

Keyboards are inefficient for two reasons: they do not exploit the redundancy in normal language; and they waste the fine analogue capabilities of the user’s motor system (fingers and eyes, for example). I describe a system intended to rectify both these inefficiencies. Dasher is a text-entry system in which a language model plays an integral role, and it’s driven by continuous gestures. Users can achieve single-finger writing speeds of 35 words per minute and hands-free writing speeds of 25 words per minute. Dasher is free software, and it works in all languages, and on many platforms. Dasher is part of Debian, and there’s even a little java version for your web-browser.

Give it a try! It takes a minute to get used to it (“We don’t know of a writing system with a learning curve steaper than this”).

In the middle of the video they show hands-free typing using gaze-tracker.

Filed under: typography, video | 1 Comment
Tagged: multitouch

I’ve been using HTML5 Canvas for a few web apps, and for the last year I’ve been avoiding rendering any text because Canvas lacks text support. Over the last year, several people have come up with workarounds.

• Firefox decided to add a non-standard method called drawWindow(), which lets you composite a hidden iframe with html text.
• The TextCanvas project adds a drawString method to the canvas api, which positions a HTML element on top of the canvas.
• The Variable Width Canvas Fonts project pre-generates an image containing characters at known locations and then uses drawImage to display the necessary characters.
• The very cool CanvasPaint project went nuts and implemented vector fonts in canvas! (more info here)
• None of the above links work in Safari. Despite being the original developers of Canvas, Safari’s Canvas support is extremely buggy. Things work better with the nightly builds, but even then, many things are broken.

I’ve been thinking about giving up on supporting Safari completely, and maybe trying out dojo’s gfx 2D graphics API, which has text support but uses SVG/VML instead of Canvas. For the time being though, I found a silly workaround. Since I only need to display numbers, I can just create 10 pngs, one for each digit. Here is a bash script that creates the number pngs using ImageMagick:

Here’s a blurry screenshot of how it looks:

Filed under: code code, typography | 0 Comments
Tagged: canvas , commandline , javascript

I got sick of our SecureImage captcha. I couldn’t type in the correct code a third of the time, and it looked ugly. So I wrote a new hacked up our existing captcha plugin to show pictures of graffiti and street art instead of computer-generated text!

Please help me test it out by leaving a comment with a link to a picture of street art. I found some great ones in this Flickr set by Trois Tetes. You can also use Flickr Creative Commons search to “find content to modify, adapt, or build upon”. Please make sure that the image has a CC license!

I’ll add attribution for the images and then post the code if no one finds a bug!

Update: Get it here!

Filed under: all talk, doodles, no code, photos, typography | 10 Comments

A lovely collection of scribbly scratchy fonts, free for your downloading pleasure.

(via del.cio.us)

Filed under: design, typography | 1 Comment