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

JavaScript Time Picker Taken to a New Level

Well done Maxime Haineault. Maxime has just released a new JQuery plug-in that I think will become the accepted way of entering dates into form fields.

It’s fast, easy to use and intuitive (localisation aside). Combined that with Maxime’s excellent design skills and it’s something attractive as well that I think you’ll start to see being used very widely on sites very soon.

It’s called the jquery.timepickr and you can check out the examples and code over at his site. http://haineault.com/media/examples/jquery-utils/demo/ui-timepickr.html [UPDATE: 11 Nov 08] It now has its on project page at http://haineault.com/media/jquery/ui-timepickr/page/

But before you dash over there, bear in mind that this is a very early release of code and or those of you watching in Black and White or Internet Explorer as it’s better known, don’t bother yet. This is experimental code and it’ll a) look bad and b) probably hang your browser.

But if you’re using Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera etc then you should see it just as intended.

I’ve included a screenshot below of the activated time picker in action.

Time Picker activated showing housr, minutes and am or pm choices

What’s nice about the time picker is that you just click once to activate it and then run your mouse to the time you require and the content of the input field continually changes showing you exactly what you’ve selected. Two clicks and you’re done.

There’s still work to be done on browser compatibility and better localisation to use the 24 hour clock etc. but this is an excellent start and I’m sure it’ll make its way into JQuery UI.

Filed under: Free Software , jquery, jquery UI, plug-ins, time picker

Aptana Professional Free 30 Day Trial

Quicky

If you’re an Apatana Studio user, and you have the community version installed, update your intallation and you’ll automatically receive a free 30 day trial for the Professional version.

Some of the main advantages of the Professional version over the free version are IE Javascript debugging and a JSON Editor.

Filed under: Free Software , aptana, javascript

How to add Vimeo videos to a WordPress.com blog

One limitation of a blog hosted on WordPress.com rather than an installation of WordPress via a web hosting company is that any code that you paste into the editor that contains JavaScript or embedded objects is usually sanitised for security reasons. That’s fair enough and the editor does allow video from YouTube, Google Video and Daily Motion to be easily added.

It’s not a documented feature, but by using a similar convention you can very very easily add Vimeo videos as well. Why would you want to? Well, it depends on the audience for your blog, but the content on Vimeo is original and very high quality. It’s free to set up an account and you can upload 500Mb of video per week.

So how do you add content from Vimeo to your WordPress.com blog? Easy. First of all you’ll need the to get video number from Vimeo site. That’ll be something like www.vimeo.com/123456. Take the number from the end of the URL, the 123456 part, and then type the following in your blog post, replacing 123456 with your own video number. You also need to remove the spaces that I have placed after the opening square bracket and before the closing square bracket.

[ vimeo vimeo.com/123456 ]

That’s all there is to it. When you preview or publish the post, the Vimeo information will be embedded into your post and will be ready for your readers to watch.

And so now you know, here’s a quick example of just how good Vimeo looks.

If you want to know more about the differences between a self-hosted wordpress blog and one hosted at wordpress.com you can get more details in this article at webglossary.co.uk.

Filed under: Free Software, How To Manage A Website, Support Articles , media, surfing, video, vimeo, wordpress

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

Is the Google Analytics Reporting Suite About To Launch?

Sticking with the Belgian theme, it looks like the Google Analytics Reporting suite may be about to come out of Beta…

Marketing activity seems to be ramping up and Nicolas Lierman, the creator of this AIR app has set up a LinkedIn Group for people interested in the reporting tool.

I saw a demo and mock ups of the new version at the beginning of April during the AIR tour in Brussels and it is radically different to  (and better than) the current Beta.

You can join the group at www.linkedin.com/e/gis/117224/5B9545647DE2

You can get the latest at www.aboutnico.be

Filed under: Adobe Air, Free Software, Web Analytics , air, analytics, belgium, google analytics, nicolas lierman