Archive for November, 2007
More Silk Icons – Silk Companion #1
FamFamFam produces a great set of 1,000+ free silky-smooth 16×16 pixel icons called Silk Icons. You can never have too much of a good thing.
Here is a small sample of the 450+ new icons in my Silk Companion #1 icon set (download) now available:
[)amien
Droid font family courtesy of Google & Ascender
Google’s Android project, an open platform for mobile devices, has been hitting the news a lot in the last couple of days with it’s open APIs, Java-based development platform and optimized virtual machine.
One thing not too many people have yet been raving over is the lovely set of typefaces from Ascender Fonts known as the Droid family.
Hidden away into the downloadable SDK’s emulator is system.img which contains various binary files including these new fonts. Being that the image is almost certainly in Linux ext format and I found no easy way of mounting it in Mac OS X or Windows I was rather pleased when I stumbled upon Beeno’s page of the extracted files.
I have already covered Droid Sans Mono with an eye for using it for programming but thought it would be worth showing the other members of the family although I haven’t drawn direct comparisons with the Mac and Windows supplied fonts as I did with Red Hat’s Liberation fonts.
The Droid fonts in Windows XP via WordPad:
The Droid fonts in Mac OS X 10.5 via TextEdit:
Updated October 2011 from Ice Cream Sandwich SDK!
Download Droid Font Family (ZIP of TTF) (1.9 MB)
[)amien
Droid Sans Mono great coding font
Google’s Android project, an open platform for mobile devices, has been hitting the news a lot in the last couple of days with it’s open APIs, Java-based development platform and optimized virtual machine which includes the lovely set of typefaces from Ascender Fonts known as the Droid family.
Check out previous coverage of the well-known and lesser-known coding fonts.
There are a number of Droid fonts including Droid Sans and Droid Serif but of particular interest for developers is the Droid Sans Mono font that looks great in Visual Studio not only at my favourite 10 point… but from 7 point upwards with either ClearType or standard font smoothing although some might find the fact it smooths at all sizes a little soft (or Mac-like).
Here it is at 9 point with Rob Conery’s Vibrant Ink 2 theme:
Here it is at 11 point with my Humane theme:
And hereis 12 point in Xcode on the Mac:
The only issues are:
- the lack of a bold weight or italic variant which limits the syntax highlighting options
- the 0 is currently not slashed (there could be some other indistinguishable character pairs)
Being that the Droid family is Apache licensed no doubt somebody will fill that gap (okay, okay, I’ll give it a shot when I get some time;-)
Download Droid Sans Mono (TrueType TTF) (79 KB, 10/2011 source)
Try my free scalable coding font Envy Code R (shown below) with Visual Studio italic support, has a bold variant and distinguishable pairs 0O etc:
[)amien
Show Package Contents in Mac OS X
Bundles are a concept in Mac OS X whereby a specially named folder becomes what appears to casual users to simply be a file that can be copied as usual and often launched by double-clicking on it.
Other operating systems have file formats that are little more than containers for other files and in doing so keep those interesting resources out of your reach. (Okay, we have DMG but that’s more of a transportation mechanism like ZIP, TAR etc.)
To see the contents of one a bundle select it and just choose Show Package Contents from Finder’s context menu (hit the Task button in the toolbar, ctrl-click or two-finger click).
The ones I find most interesting or useful are…
Application (.app)
All sorts of great resources can be found in here including icons, templates, sounds and the NIB’s for the user interface. Great for learning but consider the licence before you take resources for your own application.
Garage Band project/template (.band, .wand)
Audio files of the instruments and output can be found inside.
Safari Download (.download)
An absolute gem if you are downloading audio or video files and want to watch or listen to what has downloaded so far.
Slideshow Screen Saver (.slideSaver)
Various images used in the slideshow.
iDVD theme (.theme)
Various images in tiff format and Quartz Composer compositions you could try using as screen-savers.
Time Machine (.inProgress)
If you have a partial backup with Time Machine and need a file it my have backed up this could be a life-saver.
iPhoto Library
Your original and modified photos from iPhoto and the XML data behind them.
iMovie project (.rcProject)
Contains a QuickTime movie of all the still images used in the project.
Others
There are others to be found scattered across your file-system too:
| Extension | Type |
|---|---|
| .action | Automator action |
| .bundle | Bundle |
| .clr | Colors |
| .colorPicker | Color picker |
| .component | Component |
| .dvdproj | iDVD project |
| .fs | Filesystem |
| .kext | Kernel extension |
| .key | Keynote presentation |
| .mdiimporter | Spotlight importer |
| .nib | Interface builder |
| .numbers | Numbers spreadsheet |
| .osax | Scripting addition |
| .pages | Pages document |
| .plugin | Plug-in |
| .pkg | Installation package |
| .prefPan | Preferences pane |
| .saver | Screen saver |
| .wdgt | Dashboard widget |
| .xcDataModel | Core Data model |
| .xcodeproj | Xcode Project |
You might also want to check out this guide to examining bundles.
[)amien