A friend just IM’d me a link to a new type of cross-browser text replacement technique called typeface.js which allows for any HTML text element to be rendered in the font of your choice. Now the most common of these live-text to rendered replacement techniques is the awesome sIFR, but typeface.js is notable cause it’s only javascript.

At first I was about to write it off since the examples section of the project site shows images, but when I took some time (oh what has the internet done to our patience) to read through the background (and view source), I realized this is a pretty great and new approach to achieving this effect.

The javascript reads from the glyph information of any font you specify, which you need to add to your server after being converted using their conversion process(conversion), and then renders out the font using your browser’s vector drawing capabilities! Pretty rad indeed. Definitely something to keep your front-end eyes on.

Soon after the release of Plainview, we starting hearing about issues viewing pages that employ browser sniffing to look for compatible browsers, sites like abc.com where Safari is allowed, but Plainview is blocked. There was even suspicion that we were using an custom user-agent string which was causing trouble. Well, we weren’t, but we are now. Turns out that the sites mentioned, and many others it seems, are looking for “Safari” in the user-agent string, and WebKit does not identify itself as Safari out-of-the-box so these sites would believe Plainview to be incompatible. This is bad mojo. Apple recommends looking for “AppleWebKit” not “Safari” to ensure compatibility with WebKit powered browsers, and even offers some code to help out.

However, I hardly expect abc.com and their ilk to switch detect scripts overnight. So the next build of Plainview will include a tweaked user-agent string to identify itself as “Plainview (like Safari)” which seems to fix the issues with abc.com and hopefully others as well.

Hi, I’m Kenji. I do some front-end development around here, and I thought I’d help you get to know your new barbariangroup.com!

It’s been a relief to get this site finally out the door and in front of all you nice internet people. As Rick said (to some perhaps-deserved derision), it took over six months to bring barbariangroup.com version four (internally codenamed Merrimack) to fruition. That’s a crazy long time, sure. But we’re a small, busy shop, and couldn’t blow through this in a month. Not while continuing to pump out high-quality projects for Kashi, CNN, Adobe, TAP Project, Motorola, etc etc. We approached the barbariangroup.com version four redesign as seriously and as carefully as we would any content-rich client site, and as such, it took some time. And some people.