FontStruct – Free Fridays #17

FontStruct is a fantastic application. It’s free and it focuses on one particular task well which means it fits all the criteria for inclusion in the Friday review, but that’s not why I’m writing about it here.

By deciding to take a punt and release FontStruct for free in the Spring of 2008, FontShop did something that exemplifies the web business model and the great benefits it brings when done right.

So first of all, what is FontStruct…

FontStruct is a web app that anyone (with the time) can use to create their own fonts. USers of the servic can download their fonts and make them available for others to use under the Creative Common license. It’s available at fontstruct.fontshop.com if you want to give it a go. Registration is free. This video says it all though.

Why is it so exemplary? What have they done?

Well by setting up a free product in parallel to their core business, they did some key things.

 

1. They did what they know and love. Fonts
2. They created a framework for User Generated Content.
3. They have gently integrated their paid products into the free product.

 

By a stroke of genius they brought their passion, fonts, to an even wider audience and made it accessible to anyone with a computer. By doing so they let people in to their world, made it fun, released new talent. They gave people a behind the scene look at what they and typographers do. That’s something we all take for granted and it turns out to be not so easy after all. In other words, they’ve brought us round to respecting what they do and have picked up new customers along the way.

They also had excellent timing. FontShop, the company behind FontStruct, specialises in selling catalogues of fonts. New fonts are going to become more and more important on the web as browsers start to move beyond the standard font families over the next few years due to the widespread introduction of font embedding. It’s not a bad time to be in the font business.

The buzz around this product when it launched was enormous and things like that can help attract good people to your company and boost morale internally.

As a business they could have settled for more traditional routes to increasing their sales such as affiliates, but the products they sell on their main site cost between  €169 and €13,200.00. Not really an impulse purchase.

By setting up a free product they can rapidly build up a new user base to whom they can promote their core business.

This is what the web is good for, but you have to be quick and you have to be good at it. Most of all, it seems that those that do best at it didn’t have pure profit in mond when they started out.

So sign up at at fontstruct.fontshop.com and have a go at creating your own font. It’s not as easy as you think.

Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software, Promoting Your Website and Organisation

iContact – Free Fridays #16

iContact is more of a “one to watch” than a fully fledged application at the moment. It’s a desktop application available for Windows which can be used to access your GMail or Google Apps contacts database.

I say it’s not fully fledged as it lacks one very very important feature. It’s read only so you can’t edit your contacts yet. The developer does have this on his to do list and the ability to change and add contacts via iContact will be in the next release.

iContact Main screen

In the meantime though it’s still a worthwhile application, especially if you’ve just recently imported a load of contacts into GMail and things haven’t worked out quite as expected.

iContact Preferences Pane

The interface is very clean and the sensitivity of the search can be refined in the preferences. You can choose the sort order of the contacts and a handy feature is the option to display contacts that only have email information in a different colour, helping you manage duplicates.

Hopefully this will develop into a fully fledged application in the very near future with built in de-duplication and the useful record merge function found in Apple’s Address Book programme.

You can download a copy of iContact for free at www.dataload.com/icontact/

Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software, Information Management , contact management, gmail, gmail contacts, google apis, icontact

Google Host Javascript Libraries Free Of Charge

Performance remains top of the web app agenda with browser vendors continuing to slug it out with claims of shaving milliseconds off JavaScript performance in each new release. Meanwhile the developers of JavaScript libraries are also waging a performance war which we’ll all benefit from in the long run as web apps become more sophisticated.

But all of this is focussed on how quickly JavaScript runs in the browser and in the case of JavaScript libraries, how quickly they run, once they have been downloaded to the browser. And that’s the key point. There is still an easy performance gain to be had by eliminating the time and resources required to download these libraries from your server to the client’s browser.

So Google have begun hosting a selection of the most commonly used JavaScript libraries so that over time, they will be cached on a lot of users’ machines.

At present, if I visit a shopping web site that uses jQuery and I then visit a travel information web site that also uses jQuery then my browser will have to download the jQuery library once when I visit the shopping site and then again when I visit the travel information site even though both sites are using the same file.

If both sites download the jQuery library from a common source, in this case Google, then the file only has to be downloaded once and is available for any other sites that use jQuery as well.

By using this method, you’ll take some of the pressure off your own web server, save a bit of bandwidth and make initial performance of your site better. The latter is something that your visitors using dial up or in countries with slow connectivity will definitely appreciate.

At the moment, the libraries provided are:

• dojo
• jQuery
• MooTools
• prototype
• script.aculo.us

Google will be expanding this selection in future and its success is dependent on uptake.

You can see Dion Almaer annouce it below and full details are at code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/documentation/

Filed under: CacheFile, Free Fridays, Free Software, How To Manage A Website, Web Browsers, Web Standards, Accessibility and Best Practice , ajax, ajaxapi, bandwidth, dojo, hosting, javascript, jquery, mootools, prototype, script.aculo.us

Launchy – Free Fridays #15

Launchy is great little programme for Windows that doesn’t get in the way, but helps you access any programme on your PC without having to navigate to Start, Programs etc etc. Now hat may sound like it’s going to save you a whopping 10 seconds a day and therefore not worth bothering about. But for me. Launchy’s great strength is that it can find programmes that are hidden deep within the Progams menu.

This means you can keep your desktop free of shortcuts to programmes that you need from time to time, but aren’t as commonly used as a web broswer or a wordprocessor.

To open Launchy, just press Alt + Spacebar and an empty text box pops up.

Start typing and the names of programmes, folders, bookmarks start to appear in a list for you to choose from. As you can see from the screenshot below, the application icon appears as well to give you a visual cue when the correct programme is found.

Launchy is highly configurable and you can decide what you’d like it to have access to. So for example you can even give it access to your music collection so that when you type the name of a song, it’ll launch that file.

Between Launchy’s Alt+Spacebar and Google Desktop Ctrl + Ctrl in quick succession you can pretty much find any document or launch any programme on your machine with a couple of keystrokes.

Launchy can be downloaded from SourceForge, but their official web site is at www.launchy.net

Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software , keystroke, launcher, launchy, productivity

RegExr, An AIR Regular Expression Builder – Free Fridays #14

What could be better on a Friday afternoon that an dose of regular expressions. Anything I hear you cry. Well of course you’re right, but once you’ve mastered them, regular expressions can save you a lot of time and add power functionality to your applications.

Learn Regular Expressions By Experimenting

RegExr is an excellent tool not only for building and checking regular expressions, but also for learning RegEx because it comes a built in supply of standard RegEx.

The application is divided into 3 main areas as seen in the screenshot below.

1. contains the input field for your RegEx, the switches and flags that you can apply and an area containing text where you can see the effects of your RegEx. You can add what ever text you like to the text area so you can build and test your RegEx using relevant text.

2. contains information a breakdown of the information about your regular experssion, this is useful as RegEx are extremely difficult to read and this area parses the RegEx into it’s individual components.

3. this section is the most useful for beginners to this tricky area of programming. This section contains the store of prebuilt RegEx as well as a short explanation of what each one does. YOu can study these and use them as the basis for your own RegEx.

The application was built in Flex by the Canadian Flash developer Grant Skinner and runs on Air so it’ll work on Windows, Mac and Linux. You can download it from gskinner.com/RegExr/desktop

Filed under: Adobe Air, Free Fridays, Free Software , adobe, air, Free Software, grant skinner, regex, regexr, regular expressions

Q10 Full Screen Text Editor – Free Fridays #13

If you find writing a chore, if you prefer to work from home on days when you have to write up big reports, you’ll love Q10.

Distraction Free Writing

Q10 is a writing tool with very few features and that is what makes it so attractive. It’s a great way to start writing a piece as you can’t procrastinate into formatting headings and changing fonts etc. It’s a full screen text editor, which means that the “page” fills the entire screen and shields you from distractions. There are no tool bars and no paper clips popping up with helpful suggestions. Using Q10 is the software equivalent of going into a quiet room and closing the door behind you.

If you’ve not used a full screen text editor before you should give it a try, especially if you do a lot of writing. It has to be said though, people tend to fall into two camps over full screen editors. They either love them or hate them. Personally, I love them. I have one for my Mac called WriteRoom and was really pleased when I found this equivalent version for the PC.

Return of the Typewriter

Q10 is about as close to an old fashioned typewriter that you can get nowadays and it doesn’t leave you with sore fingers. It even makes a typing sound just like an old fashioned type writer whenever you type a character or

Ching, do a carriage return.

Ching.

That may sound annoying and not in keeping with Q10s philosophy of only including essential features. When I first installed Q10, I thought it would be the first feature that I would switch off, but I actually like it. I find that the keystroke sound is a positive confirmation that I’m writing something which starkly contrasts with ominous silence of staring at the screen.

I should just point out that I do have an office to myself and I think that the typing sound might annoy others, so use it wisely.

It Must Have Some Features?

So if there are no tool bars, there can’t be any features right? There are features, but they’re all available via keyboard short cuts. They are all easy to remember though and if at any point you can’t remember a short cut, just hit F1 and it’ll bring up the complete list.

The main features that people who write for a living will like are the timers, targets and page stats.

Hit Ctrl + t and you can set a timer for a given number of minutes. This let’s you concentrate on you writing, sets a deadline for you and makes sure you won’t be late for your next appointment.

Global targets can also be set. Rather than working to specific time deadlines, these alert you when you reach a certain number of words, lines, paragraphs or pages. You can also choose to have all of these stats displayed in the info bar at the bottom of the screen if you prefer.

There is of course a spell checker (hit F7) included and when you download Q10 you have the option to download a version with or without the spell checker, though the file is so small anyway, you may as well choose the spell checker version.

The final nice touch that I like is the auto-correct feature. You can set various combinations of letters to automatically change so that you can easily type © symbols by typing (c) for example. This is all configurable and you can add common misspellings that you’d like corrected as you type or a set of acronyms and abbreviations that you’d like to always be written out in full.

If you’re a Portable Apps user, you’ll be please to hear that Q10 is also available in a portable version.

Q10, is a rare example of an application that has all of the complexity stripped out of it in order to make your life easier. You probably won’t write the final sentence of your best selling book in Q10, but you might write the first chapter and they’re both equally important.

You can download Q10 from www.baara.com/q10

Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software , full screen text editor, q10, text editor, writing