Links, December 19th, 2025

§Birdfont

It’s been a while since I’ve wanted to make a typeface, and while Glyphs looks cool, $500 for a version that supports the features I want is a bit more than I’m willing to spend. I tried out the open source stalwart FontForge which has all the (lack of) usability you expect from open source, and among its FAQ I found a statement so offensively ignorant of the history of digital type and desktop publishing it put me off the entire project.

I hadn’t heard about Birdfont before I went looking for other alternatives, but it’s free for open-source licensed fonts and inexpensive for the fully-featured version, which includes support for color, variable, and single-stroke (CNC) fonts. It’s auto-trace feature is pretty good, and I found its interface well-laid out enough that in an evening I was able to whip up a fairly good rendition of my handwriting in alphanumerics with random substitutions, though I’m still working on the spacing and kerning:

the five boxing wizards jump quickly

It doesn’t yet export Webfonts (I’m still trying to figure out the conversion for variable fonts), and has some rough edges, but the program is under active development and they have a presence on fedi.

§Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? | Ubuntu Summit 25.10

A video of a very good talk by Scott Jenson - who worked on many facets of the Macintosh Desktop – on what I believe is is the fundamental aspect of user interface design – the metaphor – and how the ones we have for our “desktop” computing have gone stale, levels some very righteous criticism towards Apple and Microsoft for their stagnation on this front, “why I hate the term UX/UI with the heat of 1000 suns”, the nature of the relationship between programmers and designers, and how interface metaphors differ in desktop and mobile computing.

§HyperCard on the Macintosh

I’ve mentioned Hypercard in these links previously and do so again because nothing in the thirty-five years since first playing with it have I ever felt a piece of software feel so tangible. This is a great discussion on why that was so; the piece is lengthy and this is its subheader:

How do we approach the challenge of helping non-programmers build software? Do we throw up our hands at today’s complexity and say, “Just let an AI do it.” Or, do we make tools so compelling a novice can build something interesting almost by accident. We had that once. Let’s see what was lost.

§A Multimedia Sketchpad

More on Hypercard, and the contemporary attempts at re-creating it, from the creator of Decker:

I see HyperCard differently. It certainly had event-based programming wired up to interactive buttons and fields, but there was something evasively softer and more pliable about it as a medium. It broke down the hard distinctions we tend to take for granted between programs and documents, developers and users.

§The jank programming language

jank is a general-purpose programming language which embraces the interactive, value-oriented nature of Clojure as well as the desire for native compilation and minimal runtimes.

A Clojure-like hosted on an LLVM-based JIT? You’ve got my attention.

§Affordibility: This Math Ain’t Mathing

I first came across Nate Bowling, a black teacher in my corner of the Pacific Northwest who was awarded Washington State’s Teacher of the Year award who has since gone abroad, via fedi, and have found his newsletter a worthwhile read, with a great analysis of the current US economic sitaution:

This is a path we were set on during the Reagan/Thatcher Trans-Atlantic consensus and one I don’t think we’ll emerge from until we can solve the aforementioned class solidarity gap.

§Instacart Reportedly Using Secret AI-Powered Dynamic Pricing to Jack Up Prices

I still remember an incident in a college economics class where I brought up an article from Adbusters Magazine on surge pricing – in 1998! (Sorry, can’t find a link to it now.) I was told repeatedly that such a thing wasn’t possible, people wouldn’t stand for it, companies wouldn’t be that evil, etc, and why am I listening to this commie garbage?

Meanwhile, 27 years later:

The experiment found that these price differences added up. The same basket at a Safeway in Seattle cost some shoppers $114.34, others $119.85, and others $123.93 — an 8 percent increase from the lowest to the highest cost.