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Recommended Reading: Coachella was built for YouTube
Coachella 2019 review: A festival built for YouTube Paul A. Thompson, Pitchfork For years, Coachella's opening weekend has been a huge event for YouTube. A weekend's worth of livestreams don't deliver all of the acts to your living room, but the site typically offers a lot of the big names so you don't have to travel to the desert. Pitchfork explains how the festival is now designed just as much for the viewers at home in its review of the 2019 event. "Especially after Beyoncé's Earth-rattling set last year, some stars and would-be stars lunged at the chance to make statements with their performances over the weekend, with productions designed to appeal as much to live streamers as to the crowd at Indio, California's Empire Polo Club," the site notes. And perhaps no one went all-in this year as much as Childish Gambino.
The owner of Helvetica and Times New Roman just bought some emoji
Monotype just bought Swyft Media. Or, a company you probably haven't heard of just bought a company you probably haven't heard of. Monotype, for the uninitiated, is a company that helped revolutionize typesetting at the latter end of the 19th century, and owns typefaces you probably see every day like Helvetica, Times New Roman and Franklin Gothic. And Swyft? It's a startup that creates stickers and emoji. Recently profiled by Fortune, it works with brands to create custom sticker packs for apps like Facebook Messenger and Line. At first glance, an emoji advertising firm and a historic type company might seem an odd couple, but given the rate that stickers are replacing our written words, perhaps it's money well spent. The deal could (according to TechCrunch) cost Monotype up to $27 million -- a small price to pay for staying relevant in our emoji-filled future.
Twitter abandons one of humanity's most widely used fonts
The next time you visit Twitter.com things may look a little different, now that the site is rolling out a new font. After years of using Helvetica Neue, it's switching to the Gotham typeface. Already, design and typography fans are expressing dismay at the switch, although if you're still reading Tweets mostly through apps, it could be a while before you notice any difference at all. Check after the break to see the new style in action (and some of the responses to it.) [Image credit: AP Photo/Kathy Willens]
Unclutter offers digital pockets for your OS X miscellany
I have really mixed feelings about Unclutter for OS X (US$2.99). On the one hand, it's a pretty cool idea. The app offers a pull-out "drawer" on your desktop that lets you store files, make notes, and view your clipboard. On the other, parts of the app are unintuitive to use and could stand some design improvements to enhance the user experience. To begin with, I struggled to get the app to respond until I realized that you could not just click and drag from the top of the screen. I needed to use the scroll wheel to entice the application window to appear. Once I mastered that, opening the app became an easy process. The window consists of three embedded panels, each of which you can pull out and let float on your desktop. When pulling out each window, the other items resize to accommodate. When you close them (incidentally Command-W does not work, you have to click on the close X buttons), they return to the pocket window. I'm not entirely sure why anyone would extract the component panels and I'm a little surprised the developer even offers this feature, but there you have it. You cannot, however, push normal Finder windows into the pocket (I tried).T With Unclutter, you can: Preview the contents of your clipboard (left) Store files into a central folder for easy access (middle) Make notes (right) The idea is that the app gives you this instant availability without taking up space on your desktop. In practice, the three sections feel disjointed, consisting of one strong utility (the file drawer) and two rather weak ones (the Notes and Clipboard preview). I wonder why they were merged together into a single app. The Clipboard preview does exactly what it says on the label. It shows whatever items you've copied to the system pasteboard. If you copy a picture, it shows the picture. If you copy text, the text. It does not, however, reflect any styling hints you've copied (all text is shown in the same common font) and if you copy multiple images, it just lists them. I was hard pressed to find a compelling reason why the developer included this feature, but it's there. As for the Notes section, the built-in OS X Notes app does a far better job and is accessible with just a few keystrokes (Command-Space, Notes, return). OS X Notes offers tabs, sharing, and search, none of which are part of the Unclutter interface. I'm guessing the developer hoped to provide a single quick "to do" central scribbling area and it does work for quick reference. I'm just thinking that, again, it's a superfluous feature that should have been trimmed, with the app focusing on file access. The strongest portion of the app is that file storage, offering a pull-out drawer with a quick file reference. For those who wish to keep their desktop clean, this is the best of the Unclutter uncluttering tools. You can drag your files in, and access them by opening the pocket window. It's a pity then that the other two utilities take up so much of that pocket space. As is, most people will struggle to put more than a half dozen to a dozen reference items in, even users with large screen real estate. The app offers no option to disable the notes or clipboard viewer, and if you drag them out of the pocket, they're stuck on your desktop, doing the opposite of uncluttering. Adding files to the pocket was another task I struggled with. And unlike the opening and closing of the pocket, one that came with no hints or instructions. In the end, I figured out two ways to add files. First, you can drag the file panel out to your finder and add items by drag and drop. But far easier (and discovered much later), I found you could just drag files to the menu bar (this opens the pocket window) and then pull back down below the menu bar to drop them into the file panel. When you copy items to the panel, they're stored in a rather obscure folder in your personal library, specifically: ~/Library/Containers/com.softwareambience.Unclutter/Data/Library/Application Support/Unclutter/FileStorage. This is part of the OS X sandboxing system. In testing, I created a test RTF file with an easy-to-distinguish name ("snickerdoodle") and added it to my drawer. I then allowed Spotlight to update indexing. When I attempted to search for it with Spotlight, it could not be found. This would not be as much of an issue if Unclutter created aliases and left the files in-place, but since the actual file moves into the FileStorage folder, its unfortunate location may cause side effects like this. Dragging the folder back to the desktop, immediately restored its entry in the Spotlight search. As utilities go, I think Unclutter has a pretty cool basic idea -- the pocket drawer that can be accessed with a simple mouse combination. I'm just unhappy with some of the implementation details on what is otherwise a promising concept.
The graphic designer's holiday gift guide
From tablets to type, finding the right gift for the choosy graphics expert in your life can be frustrating. Here are plenty of ideas at a variety of price points that should make any designer merry and joyful. Graphics Tablets For any designer, a graphics tablet is a great way to illustrate, or just precisely control your mouse. I started using one about eight years ago to cope with RSI, and I've never looked back. Wacom offers the Graphire Wireless 6" x 8" tablet that connects to your Mac via Bluetooth. (It's not entirely wireless, however: you have to plug it in to charge it.) You can use it up to 30 feet away. If Bluetooth isn't your thing, or charging your tablet every night doesn't sound like fun, the Intuos 3 USB tablet is available in a variety of sizes, including 6" x 8". The USB version also offers more dynamic pressure sensitivity, touch strips, accessories, and a five-button mouse. Wacom Graphire Wireless 6 x 8 tablet: $249 Wacom Intuos 3 USB 6 x 8 tablet: $329 SlimKey v2 Keeping your desk tidy is a constant challenge for the designer. Designers tend to fall into three categories when organizing their desks: the piler, the spreader, and whatever. In any case, keeping your monitor up and away from the mess is sometimes helpful (or, it gives you more room to spread stuff into). The SlimKey v2 raises your iMac or Cinema Display with a spiffy ribbon of aluminum designed to match your hardware. Plus, it features four powered USB 2.0 ports: very handy if you have an iMac and a lot of peripherals. SlimKey v2: $65
Gruber hacks iPhone Notes with Helvetica
Regular readers of Daring Fireball know John Gruber has an almost unhealthy fascination with the Helvetica font, but sometimes fanaticism pays positive results. Today he posted a hack to make the iPhone Notes application use Helvetica rather than the much despised Marker Felt font. The hack involves actually modifying the MobileNotes.app binary with a hex editor on your Mac and is thus probably not for the faint of heart. Needless to say you'll also need to have already hacked the iPhone enough to get access to the MobileNotes.app binary in the first place, but if you just can't stand Marker Felt here's a way to fix it. Gruber also warns, however, that there's no telling how long this hack will work, particularly with the forthcoming firmware update.
