Today Grapefruit turned 10.
Ten years ago, me, Marius Ursache and Stefan Călin Liuțe joined forces and created Grapefruit (back then called ‘Grapefruit Design’). We were the first in Romania to tell and do many things about corporate and brand identity, naming, brand manuals and web sites.
Well, as opposed to these typographical differences, I believe that this illustration gives you the feel of Arial versus Helvetica.
In a near dark future we may have to go this way. Have our public tweets bot proof, and the Twitter API returning base64 encoded images of our tweets instead of text, unless you’re a really good friend … then you may have some of your friends sell your plain text tweets to advertisers, friends hacking friends’ accounts to harvest more sellable tweets, etc.
Well, that’s a dark vision of the future, fueled by the readings I’m doing for a Cyberpunk course at the Peer 2 Peer University.
I’m quite pleased with 3 Mobile Broadband, the only serious issue was a daily kernel panic…and since there are no better drivers from Huawei, the solution was not to use those drivers, but to plug the 3G dongle into a non-OS X machine.
A recent blog post of Oliver Reichenstein “Kill Blog Comments?” stirred up some interesting discussions on twitter.
The most interesting issue would be how to track those comments on twitter, Olivier’s initial tweet “New blog post: Kill Blog Comments? http://tinyurl.com/dhpg8k” had as a matter of identification only the tinyurl.
I moved the blog’s from Movable Type to NetKernel, for the moment the steps I did were:
Then I annotated the template with hAtom microformat and RDFa, the goal was to yield the same RDF triples from a blog entry wherever I was extracting the RDFa or I was transforming hAtom to Atom (via Robert Bachmann’s hAtom2Atom) and then Atom to RDF (via Masahide Kanzaki’s atom2rdfs).
FOWA London’08 was awesome, the speakers were great, the audience was likewise. Now, shortly some impressions from day one (waiting for the videos of day two to be posted online):
Languages don’t scale (Blaine Cook, ex Chief Engineer at Twitter & Joe Stump, digg) was funny and insightful. Later Blaine Cook explained how XMPP can “save” REST (Colliding Worlds: Using Jabber to make awesome web sites).
Tim Bray gave a very motivational speech, I twittered it almost all (I wonder how many followers I lost in the
process):
Interesting things spotted around: howsociable.com (from inunda.com), Swirrl.com, Zembly.com, and flexiscale.com cloud computing thing (with which I’m playing right now).
Yes, I’m (finally) about to change the blog, template, engine, etc. I spent too much time designing a template, now as I finally reached a conclusion I’m going to write the engine behind it. It will be based on NetKernel and Talis Platform. Watch this space.
Almost 100% of the presentations or the posters were using Arial typeface. (Notable exceptions: Knud Möller was using Helvetica, David Huynh with Gill Sans and me with Optima)
Not to mention the usual bad typography (which includes the conference’s banners and printed materials)…
(For a good view over ISWC’07, check iswc 2007 in Technorati)