iSight Expert Teaser

iSight Expert’s website is due to launch soon. I have some teaser material for all you béta-testers in anticipation. More details, on more apps, very soon.

Typographic Wednesday; Dreamfonts and redesigns.

It’s wednesday again, time for the weekly type feature. Some people claim this weblog has no base to make typographic posts on, but I disagree; type design, by it’s very nature, is hacking the way we read.

I wanted to start this post with a font that was plaguing me in the streets. The movie ‘Dreamgirls’ has gotten quite large, and although I have no incentive to see it, the poster of the movie is a fine example of appealing design;

It’s avant-gardish, isn’t it? It’s not, but it has been designed by Herb Lubalin, orginally, the designer of the Avant-Garde logotype. Incipit is carrying exclusive rights to the digitized version, and it’s a beauty. I’ve highlighted some of my personal favorite glyphs.

Another eye-catching beauty I stumbled upon is Halvorsen, a very nice Sans-Serif font that has a very friendly atmosphere to it. I appreciate it’s delicate negative space.

In a time of many redesigns, cartoonist insider Cagle flames the recent L.A. Times redesign, counting 22 fonts. As a graphic designer, I have no idea who did this redesign, but they must surely be out of their minds. The other recent redesign, that of the Times, by pentagram, did great;

I really love the horizontal axis; it just works. Very nice redesign, keeping with the magazine’s roots, supposedly (once again, not American) and well, looking good.

In a slightly related note, Google acquired Trendalyzer. Trendalyzer makes pretty graphs, like so;

This is a trend (no pun intended); there is mounting interest in this market. Typographic representation of information and infoviz (visualization) are becoming very interesting markets for designers and coders alike. As technology progresses, both technically using a computer and it’s technology and designing new methods of representing information will become more and more interwoven, and will result in fantastic things.

I hoped to make an update with some glyphs of my own, alas, I’m afraid it will have to wait until the week-end; I am still digging into RADIUS and it’s dozen authentication protocols first. Bon bézier, au revoir.

Thoughts of the Day.

I’m such an idiot. I could have saved up for a student Apple Developer pack, but I didn’t notice it on the ADC site until now. I am such an idiot. I am going to get it now, and I will make sure my resumé will be stunning by next year, so I can participate in the WWDC Student Scholarship Program - a free ticket, and a week of great guidance and training by people in the field. It’s submission deadline was yesterday. D’oh! I hope to give an edge to my submission next year by having my CISSP, and two apps in the wild. Of course, I will even try to give a workshop on one of these apps when it is done in time for CCC.

Meanwhile, at my school, the Academy of Arts in Groningen, I am going to help set up RADIUS / EAP with an OpenDirectory backend. Hopefully, this will help in relieving the problems we had with MAC address lists and it’s vulnerabilities. I hasn’t been pushed through in a year, so I hope to make a difference, and get something out of it in the process (PPC macs and a large amount of iSight-enabled macs for testing my app).

Typographic Wednesday is tomorrow, and I already have a lot of material saved up. Expect a stacked post tomorrow, as well as perhaps the release of my new check-up of Leopard, and a few days after that, Leopard Server, as they are in their current states. I’ve gotten some nice publicity since my last how-to, including some words on Ars (thanks guys! If there is one thing I enjoy, it actual critique and input.) and getting to the Google Reader frontpage. Oh yeah, hello Czech people! I see you guys are enjoying the how-to as well. Good to know.

So, there are going to be a lot of updates soon. A little graphic round-up of the features of iSight Expert is coming, of course more concrete info on the newest app in the works; Fortitude. Look out for more articles on Mac security too. It’s going to be a fun week.

Fortitude; a teaser.

More information soon on this exciting new application by yours truly…

Google likes me.

Yeah, I guess Google really likes me. Here’s why;

Who needs SEO when you get results like this? Thanks, blogosphere!

iSight Expert. It kicks ass.

digg this!

It’s a mobile world, and your Macbook goes just about anywhere. Sometimes, you just leave it on the desk at your workplace, or at home. Sometimes, you leave it on. Sometimes you don’t. There is always some chance that your attention isn’t on your portable. Theft could easily occur.

iSight Expert isn’t a countermeasure for theft. It’s a range of tools anyone can use to their advantage. Many Macs come with a built-in iSight, but lack tools to use it in a more unorthodox way.

Want to use your iMac as a motion alarm?
- Want to keep a timelapse of how you look?
- Do you want to know where your employees are?
- Do you want a picture taken at a failed login?

iSight Expert can not only do all those things, but also export a customized application for you that you can install on any iSight-equipped Mac, and will function as you have defined it;

* Send Emails with it’s Geographic location and images.
* Securely upload recent images and data to a web server
* Make a movie of a month’s or week’s images
* Take images at startup, login, logout, wakeup, failed passwords, or motion.
* Act on a change of images or a face in the camera (e.g. run a script, play a song)

And there is much more. iSight Expert can organise the sent images of all your equipped Macs, put them online automatically for you, or print them. In it’s slick interface, you can see at what date, and at what location the image was taken. It’s Growl enabled, meaning you can get nifty little dialogues when you get a new image.

A beta-test is opening soon. Leave a comment, or email me to enter consideration. edit; I have had a lot of replies. I still need beta testers who have access to, and are able to test, a different application on OS X server. If you have both, be sure to email.

Significant Computer Crash

Updates planned today will be postponed to another date. Check back via email or comments.

The Graphic Friday

There has been a whole buzz of news in graphics, GUI, Open Source, and all topics in between in this week, prompting for a new weekly; The Graphic Friday. I’ve mostly decided to add this weekly because there has been an influx of demand for more (regular) posts concerning typography and graphic design (or eye candy, whatever you’d like to call it ;)).

Everyone’s favorite linux distribution, Ubuntu, has gotten a website redesign. A lot of negative feedback was unearthed with the redesign, but I must say, I like it. It’s gotten a sense of information architecture now (most needed information, like a link to the forum, a link to the files, etc), and it’s, well, in line with the general ‘Human’ theme they have had going on in Gnome for a long time now - complete with rounded corners. Ooh, rounded corners, they just seem to be popping up everywhere, don’t they?

Anyway, for even sexier Open Source desktops, a Beryl equivalent of Gnome-Look was also launched today; Beryl-Themes. For those unacquainted with Beryl (you must have been living under a mountain to miss this whole ‘Linux’ thing), it’s a super-dope 3d desktop, complete with theming abilities and productivity enhancements like zoom (as seen in OS X), ‘exposé) (as seen in OS X), and negative (as seen in any OS).

And even more sexy UI news from Open-Source land; Neil J. Patel, a new true innovator in the GNOME project (GNOME is as much as the entire UI in a lot of Linux distributions, and a host of other features that are essential to any desktop operating system) released some screenshots of Affinity, a new GNOME search tool (not quite unlike OS X’s Spotlight).

That’s Affinity set loose on Beagle’s backend (Beagle is a search engine, metadata indexer, much like Tiger’s Spotlight 1.01).

I want to conclude this one Open-Source edition of the Graphic Friday with a film I have just seen, and I rate second best anime next to Akira; Howl’s Moving Castle (grammar nazi cataclysm avoided by Jelmar). It’s immense - what a great movie. I can absolutely recommend it to anyone who enjoys a whole lot of eye candy and weird, speampunk-esque worlds. Impeccable animation and a very strong plot make it a joy to watch.

I will be checking out CCC this year!

The Chaos Communication Camp is coming up, an excellent time to catch up with some like-minded people, be in the sun with your computer and walk into lectures, workshops, tesla generators, and more insanely cool stuff. I’ve checked out the 2003 video (this one), and it seems to be a very nice camp.
Topic for this year are;

* flying and non-flying autonomous robots
* security, encryption and anonymity
* software projects
* technologies for the day after the climate change
* rapid prototyping and fabbing
* software and hardware for disaster-resistant infrastructure
* bringing broadband to the countryside
* politics and propaganda
* anti-crowd-control tactics and technologies
* lock picking
* alternative energy systems
* citizen surveillance, data mining technologies, and social networks
* data forensic methods
* all things radio (preferably digital)
* self-sustaining and -reproducing hardware
* pollution free transport systems
* hacker anthropology and sociology of the scene
* flying cars, saucers and carpets
* 42
* tesla generators
* telecommunication technologies
* FPGA based analysis
* military technologies
* all kinds of voting computers
* ebooks
* satellites and rockets

I didn’t make an understatement with the term ‘insane’, did I? Be sure to check out the video, and I will be preparing all sorts of nice stuff for the CCC. I am planning, perhaps a lecture, or a workshop. At least, I will deal out some of my fonts, for free, on nicely designed CD’s. Also, some exclusive layered gimp files if the GIMP guys decide to be there as well, this year. Absolutely looking forward to it!

Sneak Preview; Security in Leopard.

(…) Leopard, Apple’s new operating system slated for release later this spring, has already been dubbed the new ‘most advanced operating system in the world’. In Leopard, Apple builds further on the foundation of the open-source XNU kernel, and makes some very drastic changes in filesystem, interface, and configuration. One of these major changes is the control panel for security and the control panel for networking. The firewall, once conveniently located in the ‘Sharing’ panel in Tiger, now resides under the ‘Security’ panel. It’s options, however, have taken a beating.

From the panel in Leopard, one can choose to allow incoming connections, disallow them, or allow only specific services or applications. In the current developer release of Leopard, the firewall’s default ruleset is easy to summarize;

[pretty much anything]> ; Allow.

I have played around with the GUI for a bit, and it seems the Services panel is about as clever as Tiger’s firewall preference panel. It’s not specifically doing what you are instructing it to do. When you check a radio button that says it will disallow all incoming connections, many services, including a host of exploitable services like svrloc and CUPS still get incoming connections and are even able to establish a connection. (…)

Expect much more soon on the preliminary security checkup of Leopard, any hacker’s new favorite OS.