Morganically Grown

I’ve updated MiniPosts with a few bug fixes. No new features in this release, but some good bug fixes. Download it from the WordPress Plugin Repository.

Today I’m releasing Typography, a modal keyboard layout for Mac OS X. It maps over 350 glyphs to the standard U.S. keyboard, grouped into “modes,” with highly intuitive, mnemonic keystrokes. It is available for download on its dedicated page.

Features:

• Number pad accents & diacritics
• Natural ligature & letterform entry
• Full sets of quotation marks, symbols, bullets, dashes, spaces, and mathematical characters
• Unicode Roman numerals, superscripts, subscripts, and currency sets
• Natural vulgar fraction entry
• Full set of upper and lowercase Greek characters
• Extended arrow set with number pad entry
• Mac OS keyboard glyph set

Rather than mapping strictly to Option and Shift-Option sequences, Typography groups like characters into sets, each set accessible with an Option keystroke. From there, each glyph is mapped either to an easy-to-remember single stroke, or to a series of strokes that compose a ligature or letterform.

It’s a Unicode keyboard layout, so it can only be used in applications which support Unicode layouts. Most recent releases of applications (i.e. within the past few years) include support for Unicode layouts.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I do! I’d love to hear your feedback, either via email or comment.

Links:

• Typography Keyboard Layout
• Typography Mappings

To everyone who has posted a comment on this site in the past six months: I’m really, really sorry — I just logged in to find 131 comments (only about a third of which were spam) pending in the moderation queue. My first thought was, “What the hell? It’s supposed to email me when there’s a comment in the queue.” After going through and approving all the legitimate ones, I came to the realization that it was sending me emails — I had just forgotten that it sends them to a certain account, one which I forgot to add back to Mail after I upgraded to Tiger.

No wonder it was so quiet around here. Duh.

To respond to a few frequently-asked questions:

• I do intend to continue development on both Multilingual and MiniPosts.
• Unfortunately, I can’t do so right away, but I intend to pick them back up as soon as I am able.
• I apologize for being out of commission for so long — I hate using the “There are so many hours in the day” excuse, but I’ve come to the realization that it’s true.
• I will try to respond to most of the help-related queries this week.

In other news, although I know it won’t help those folks who are eagerly awaiting stability in Multilingual or help with MiniPosts, I’m preparing something neat for the Mac-based developers/graphic designers/typographers out there. Look for that to be posted soon.

Douglas Bowman just posted a great article about his belief that, when preparing designs for a client, a firm’s responsibility lies in directing the client “toward the best and most appropriate final design.” His approach is to involve the client much earlier in the design phase, asking questions at key points to guide both the client and himself toward one solution — rather than preparing multiple designs for a final presentation from which the client must choose. A great read on design directions.

I suppose, since others have already beat me to blogging it (Chris, Firas), it’s probably time to mention my new plugin project here.

Multilingual is a WordPress plugin I’ve been developing with Chris Waigl (who blogs bilingually herself), and which has recently been generating some amount of interest among the international bloggers in #wordpress. Its goal is to provide a powerful means to blog in any number of languages, and we hope to make it the most intuitive, powerful and elegant multilingual blogging tool available — all in a simple plugin form.

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Eric Meyer has a lovely story about his 13-month-old daughter Carolyn’s progress learning Baby Signs. It’s absolutely fascinating to think that one can communicate via sign language with a child who hasn’t yet learned to speak. Naturally, I immediately decided that all of my children will be raised using Baby Signs.

This year’s Macworld San Francisco was, if the deluge of blogosphere responses is any indication, extremely important. Apple introduced three very significant brand-new products and updated six others, in addition to more demoing of Mac OS X Tiger — all to an overwhelmingly ecstatic response.

I haven’t seen such a positive buzz come out of a Macworld since I can remember. Last year’s MWSF, for instance, left people bewildered and underwhelmed at the pricing of the iPod mini. But everything that came out of the keynote this morning has sparked such enthusiasm in the Mac community that it is bound to go down as one of the most significant Macworlds ever.

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I’ve written a WordPress plugin for “asides,” or small posts. It requires WordPress 1.5, and may be downloaded from the WordPress plugin repository.

Further information, including the changelog and all future updates, are available on the plugin’s own page.

I’ve updated to the latest nightly of WordPress 1.5. I’m sticking with the default Kubrick-style theme for the time being, until I can finish redesigning the site.

I’m also using a couple of experimental custom plugins, which might cause some things to work incorrectly. If you notice anything not working properly, please email me (first name at this domain) and let me know.

A few catkus of my own for your perusal:

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