I HATE APPLE

I'm intrigued by the legal difference between Johnston and Gill Sans. Transport For London still claims ownership of Johnston and, especially, New Johnston - does the Strategic Rail Authority have any rights over Gill Sans?

I'm intrigued by the legal difference between Johnston and Gill Sans. Transport For London still claims ownership of Johnston and, especially, New Johnston - does the Strategic Rail Authority have any rights over Gill Sans?

Definately Original Johnston. I believe on Johnston the copyright has lapsed, Johnston himself having died more than 70 years ago but I don't know if a font can be trademarked as an entity in itself or whether it is is just the usage (Roundel, signage, map styles etc.) that is trademarked. I believe that New Johnston is under copyright and the move to new johnston was as much about having an important part of the coporate identity under copyright as improving clarity.

I shall persuade Ambrose to ask his Dad who knows about thses things.

As for Gill Sans, it's not been used on the railways for years. I'm not sure what is the type face is nowadays but it's not proper Gill Sans nowadays.

(*somewhere* I have a 1970-something issue of Modern Railways magazine with a "Ten years of the Design Panel" article)

* this may not have been what it was actually called - I'm sure it was Corporate Something, though.

I'm pretty happy w/the ST1040/TOS box I use for midi sequencing, heh.

standard font on my SUSE box = Black Chancery.

I was thinking about getting one of those mac minis, loading it up w/a 8x8 midi interface, a MOTU firewire 8x8 audio interface and using it as a replacement for my atari/hdr setup. Maybe I'm not so sure now. Ally + tombot on this thread are great!!

Arial is good for small font sizes on non-anti-aliased screens. If you don't have ClearType turned on and you're reading a small sidebar, Arial is what you want. Otherwise it's pretty ugly.

If you could push a feature request, or perhaps a bug on your
wish-list to the top of Apples' radar for OSX, what would it
be?
Kill Finder X. It's really that bad. But don't just
resuscitate Finder 9 -- do better. Finder 9 always needed a
toolbar, for example. Finder 9 needed a plugin architecture.
Finder X does trounce Finder 9 in terms of built-in search,
though.
There are people out there who know what the next Finder looks
like. Apple needs to get out of their way and let them deliver
it.
You seem like a guy who prefers to refactor rather than
rewrite, so I'm going to assume you wouldn't say that lightly,
and we'll just proceed on the assumption that Finder X is a
complete clusterfuck. How does a company known for its
innovation, craftsmanship and software skills let something
like Finder X out the door?
Finder X is the compromise between the Mac OS folks and the
NeXT folks. Neither won, everybody lost.
Oh my god, the entire bastardized notion of switching from
metal to aqua and hiding the sidebar when clicking on the
toolbar chiclet in the upper right-hand corner.
Bonus: notice how if you click on the extreme right of the
chiclet and try to switch back, you fail -- the window theme
switch moved the chiclet slightly to the left and now you've
got to follow it. Gag. Folks, this type of stuff makes Gnome
look good.
I don't know how Finder X shipped. Someone high enough must
be in love with it that the normal human interface vetting+
feedback process didn't/couldn't take place.

the thing in the upper right

Anyway, Tog says: http://www.asktog.com/columns/060MonsterMac.html

People need to stop being such cranks. Iterative improvments are going to come along.

Um. So I'm not saying there couldn't be a better Finder, but... is that really all the guy can find to complain about?

(maybe it's a joke)

I would say applecare is important for laptops, less so for desktops.

AppleCare is pretty essential for laptops. They're expensive, they get beat up, and if the screen fails you're already way ahead of the game in overall cost.

I've actually had to use it once and it saved plenty of time being able to leap-frog ahead to the front of the support line. To be fair though, if I don't have my laptop I'm not able to work at all - making that "does it pay for itself" question pretty easy to answer.

(they seem to run xp happily enough 8)

Agreed. My solution was to buy a g4 tower on eBay. I think there's a sweet spot in price/performance right now from the "Digital Audio" models up to the early Mirrored Drive Door g4s. Unless you're doing really processor-intensive stuff, they should be snappy for a few years still. The last batch of g4 towers are still overpriced on ebay, though.