Windows has changed a lot over the years, but how backwards compatible has it remained? This experiment started with Windows 1.0, installing upgrades right through to Windows 7.
How many programs and settings could remain intact across almost twenty years of OS updates? You might be surprised… Bonus points if you spot which version of Windows is missing.
Anyone who thinks that the Internet revolution is in anything but its early phase had better take a look at Cisco’s latest Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast (PDF). There are so many startling predictions and observations in the report that we’ll just begin with these headlines:
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Less than two years ago, no one on Twitter had more than a million followers.
Back then, CNN’s Twitter account was in the lead for “most followers”, and guess what? It wasn’t even run by the company. At the time, Ashton Kutcher, who was even behind Britney Spears, challenged CNN in a competition to reach the coveted million follower milestone.
Kutcher put serious effort in, going so far as to purchase billboard ads, and quickly became the first person on Twitter with a million followers. Although Kutcher’s follower base continued to grow, less than a year later Britney Spears surpassed Kutcher again. With 4.9 million followers she was the “Queen of Twitter” in May last year.
Meanwhile, Twitter was growing rapidly as a service. Fast forward to present time and having a million users isn’t as impressive as it once was; non-celebrities, who you may never have heard of could have over a million followers, particularly if they are in an industry specific role.
So what’s happening in the trenches now then?
Kutcher isn’t even in the top 5 anymore. In November of last year, he was passed by a 16 year old boy named Justin Bieber. The moment Bieber passed Kutcher:
‘Graph by Twitter Counter‘
One month ago, President Obama left Kutcher in his dust, placing Kutcher at #6. Don’t feel too sorry for the guy; he still maintains a healthy 6,367,134 followers.
But let’s have a look at the top 5. Everyone is climbing, with Kim Kardashian at 6.4 million followers and Obama with 6.7 million followers closing the reigns. The top 3 consist of Britney Spears with 6.9 million followers, Justin Bieber with 7.5 million followers and Lady Gaga as the new Queen of Twitter with 8.3 million followers.
‘Graph by Twitter Counter‘
Who’s the next number 1?
Things can change fast in Twitter-country and what you might have noticed in the graph above (and in all other media) is the rise of Justin Bieber. The 16 year old seemed to come out of nowhere on Twitter, racing passed Obama, the president of the U.S. in October and Ashton Kutcher in November last year, gaining a staggering +440,000 followers between the moment he waved at Obama and laughed at Kutcher.
Bieber moved on to leave Britney Spears in the dust a month ago and is now rocketing towards Lady Gaga to take her crown. And we use rocketing here deliberately, because when you look at the graph below on growth ratio, it’s clear this guy is on fire.
‘Graph by Twitter Counter‘
When will he be crowned the King of Twitter? Well, he is currently growing steadily 1.5 times faster than Lady Gaga, … so if he gains 6,203 followers a day more than the diva and the difference between them is 742,602 followers, it should take another 119 days for him to become the new King of Followers.
Update:
Worth mentioning that Charlie Sheen hasn’t passed a million yet (664,118 followers and counting) but – since his arrival on twitter yesterday – he’s getting 1343 followers every 5 minutes. That’s the craziest growth ratio we’ve seen so far. Check Charlie Sheen’s Twitter stats.
Freelancers need contracts. Going in without one often ends painfully–freelancers may find their clients have disappeared off the face of the earth, and their checkbook has gone with them. It’s a scenario that is all too common.
Unfortunately, getting a contract together can be pricey business if you go to a lawyer and have one drawn up. While that may be the best way to get a contract that’s tailored for the specifics of your business, there are a bunch of contract templates around the web that you can use while you’re getting started.
“So, when the day comes in which the client understands thing one way and our contract said something else, who is actually correct? Technically our contract is the final word. It is a valuable safety net. But that is its secondary purpose. When it comes down to running a long term healthy business, working with a client is much like being married. It is a long running set of compromises. My wife often says things to me (while I am focused and working) which I never hear. Later when we find ourselves arguing, who is at fault? Is it her fault for thinking I was engaged when I clearly was not? Was it my fault, as I did not take the time to stop what I was doing and giving her my full attention. In one short word: Yes. But does it actually matter whose fault it is? Not really. What is vital is that communication resumes.”
“Before you start any project or do any kind of work. Always get a signed contract and a 50% deposit. A contract protects you and your client from any miscommunications. A 50% deposit insures that the client is serious about working with you. Consult an attorney once you have drafted a contract, to cover all your bases.”
“It does not take a one-size-fits-all approach, and it is not an extensive pre-printed document where you simply fill in the blanks. Instead, this agreement acknowledges that most design firms develop their own custom proposal document for each project and are looking for an appropriate set of terms and conditions to attach to it. When put together and signed, the custom proposal document and its attached terms and conditions comprise the binding agreement with the client. With this in mind, the focus of the AIGA Standard Form of Agreement is on those terms and conditions.”
“A good contract is necessary to every freelance web designer. Without a contract, there’s no legal requirement for the other party to pay you upon completion of work (at the very least difficult to prove). Here are important parts to include in your own web design contract.”
“Maybe you’re a gun for hire, a one man army with your back to the wall and nothing standing between you and the line at a soup kitchen but your wits. Maybe you work for the agency, or like me you run one of your own. Either way, when times get tough and people get nasty, you’ll need more than a killer smile to save you. You’ll need a killer contract too.”
If there’s a topic that’s bound to get designers riled up into a fiery debate, it’s the issue of choosing the most readable fonts for use on the screen. For most of the web’s life, designers haven’t had much flexibility when it comes to setting the type for their sites, and type decisions have almost always come down to choosing one or two web-safe fonts (a small collection of fonts that are installed on most users’ machines) and setting the font sizes.
CSS’s @font-face has garnered significant attention in the past year as browsers expanded their support for it and major type foundries began developing web licenses, making services such as Typekit possible. What many people don’t realize is that @font-face isn’t new–in fact, Internet Explorer 6, every web designer’s headache, supported it before just about everyone else.
There were many problems with Microsoft’s implementation. The company limited support to the their own proprietary, DRM-protected format to reassure foundries that designers wouldn’t be able to upload fonts in their libraries and in so doing make those premium fonts available to sneaky downloaders. Instead of dealing with Microsoft’s format and having to design fallbacks for every other browser, designers stuck to web-safe fonts and @font-face remained obscure. To make matters worse, embedded fonts require add to a page’s download time, and before high-speed connections became the norm it simply wasn’t worth the load time tradeoff.
That’s why, until recently, web typography remained a primitive art–the tools were simply not there to work with. Things have changed now, and we can start to explore beyond the serif versus sans-serif debate–though that’s as good a place as any to begin.
There are two main types of font: serif and sans-serif. A serif font contains structural details that adorn the ends of the lines used to make up a letter or numeral–these adornments are called serifs. A sans-serif font is just what it sounds like–a typeface without serifs.
In the image below, you can see two fonts that are frequently billed as among the web’s most readable. On the left is a serif, Georgia, and on the right is a sans-serif, Helvetica.
In print design, we’re told that serif fonts are considered the most readable. The serifs purportedly serve as aids to the eye, moving you from one letter to the next in a smoother fashion. Given this age-old knowledge, it would make sense to assume that serif fonts would also make for a more readable experience on the screen, right? But as if to make life more difficult for designers everywhere, that’s not the case.
When low resolution screens were common, it became apparent that fonts designed for print didn’t look right on screen. Print fonts were vectors, geometric instructions detailing the outline of each character, which worked well for printers that commonly started at resolutions ten times higher than computer screens and higher. But when you took these fonts and viewed them on a screen capable of showing a tenth of the resolution, there simply weren’t enough pixels to display the details of the typeface naturally.
To counter this issue, font designers created bitmapped fonts. Instead of using vectors, lines that could scale smoothly to any size, bitmapped fonts described each character on a grid of pixels. The problem with this approach was that the font designer had to create bitmaps for each font size, and when you tried to use an unsupported size, the characters would appear jagged and pixelated. It’s exactly the same principle at work when you take a digital photograph, which are also bitmapped, and enlarge it beyond the resolution it was taken at.
Today, our devices boast screens that have higher PPI (pixel per inch) counts than ever before. On devices such as the iPhone 4, the display is so dense that research shows the individual pixels are no longer visible to the human eye.
The bottom line is that the fewer details a font needs to convey a character clearly, the more readable it will appear on a broader range of screens. To the frustration of designers, there are still people using displays that are more than ten years old, and a good screen font doesn’t neglect technology that is still in widespread use. Our displays are becoming more and more capable, but the adoption rates need to catch up before typographers can breathe a sigh of relief.
Designers love to argue on this topic, but the current consensus–at least as close as anyone can get to one–is that sans-serif fonts are still superior for screen body text, and serif fonts are best used for headings. For many users with newer displays, though, the difference is negligible.
So we know what type of font looks best on screen–but what about the best typeface for readability? Personally, I doubt there is any one typeface to rule them all. There are typefaces more suited to screen body text readability than others, and from that group you can probably settle on a group of the best choices–but there are other factors to consider, such as the situation the font is used in, and even personal taste. Obviously, fonts designed specifically for the screen are going to do a better job than sans-serifs designed for print.
As a Mac user, my own favorite place to start a new web project is with Helvetica. It’s often only a starting point until I make a decision based on the project’s needs, but it looks great on the screen. Helvetica looks less flattering on Windows using default fonts, but that’s okay–simply set your font to sans-serif in lieu of specific font names and Mac users will see Helvetica while Windows users see Arial.
When we’re able to use @font-face services such as Typekit, our options open right up. For instance, one of my favorite readable fonts served by Typekit is Proxima Nova.
Screenshot from the Typekit Proxima Nova specimen.
What are the best typefaces? Well, you tell us.
We want to know what your favorite on-screen fonts are, and why. Tell us all about them in the comments.