Monthly Archives: June 2010
Extensis volunteers at the Oregon Food Bank
June 29th, 2010 by Jim Kidwell
Guest Post by Extensis Sr. HR Generalist, Carli Edvalson
Still suffering from record high unemployment, it’s no surprise that hunger is rampant in Oregon, but did you know that we rank 2nd in the Nation, only behind Mississippi, in hunger statistics? These difficult economic times have forced record numbers of Oregonians to seek emergency food. 240,000 people per month eat meals from emergency food boxes. Of those, 36 percent are children. These statistics were enough to inspire Extensis employees to get involved in the fight against hunger.
In a coordinated group effort, 10 Extensis employees volunteered to spend a Thursday afternoon bagging apples at the Oregon Food Bank, and whether we were motivated by genuine charitable intentions or just needed an excuse to get out of the office, what resulted was a rare opportunity to socialize with our peers while contributing to a greater good, and a valuable learning experience.
Our session commenced with a tour of the Oregon Food Bank, where we quickly realized this was more than just a food distribution warehouse. Who knew that the Oregon Food Bank had a massive and lush organic garden, harvested by community groups and offering gardening workshops to at-risk youth? Or that they offer nutrition education courses to low-income groups that include grocery shopping trips and cooking lessons taught by local chefs that volunteer their time? The Oregon Food Bank is overall, a very impressive operation, doing more good for more people that one might imagine.
We joined over 50 other volunteers packing apples that day. The Extensis team contributed to the overall total of 14,901 pounds of apples…enough food to provide 11,462 meals for people in need…leading me to borrow from Matt Damon’s memorable line in the film Good Will Hunting, “How ya like them apples?”
There are endless ways to help fight hunger…to learn more, visit www.oregonfoodbank.org
iPhone and iPad web fonts – SVG Web Font Support in WebINK
June 28th, 2010 by Jim Kidwell
We’ve enabled experimental support for iPhone and iPad in WebINK.
Some browsers (most notably the browser on Apple’s iPhone, iPad and other mobile devices) only support the SVG format for downloadable fonts. Unfortunately, because SVG is a graphics format and not specifically a font format, the CSS needed to support these browsers needs to be slightly modified to support SVG files.
To enable SVG support, you need to make a slight modification to the CSS that is generated by WebINK for your Type Drawers.
Suppose the CSS for your Type Drawer looks like this:
@font-face {
font-family: Adrenaline;
src: url('http://fnt.webink.com/?drawer=FFFFFFFF-0000-0000-0000-FFFFFFFFFFFF&font=00000000-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-000000000000'); }
To add support for SVG fonts, you can add this:
url('http://fnt.webink.com/wfs/?drawer=FFFFFFFF-0000-0000-0000-FFFFFFFFFFFF&font=00000000-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-000000000000#font') format('svg');
So that your CSS looks like this:
@font-face {
font-family: Adrenaline;
src: url('http://fnt.webink.com/?drawer=FFFFFFFF-0000-0000-0000-FFFFFFFFFFFF&font=00000000-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-000000000000'),
url('http://fnt.webink.com/wfs/?drawer=FFFFFFFF-0000-0000-0000-FFFFFFFFFFFF&font=00000000-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-000000000000#font') format('svg'); }
The second URL tells WebINK to provide the SVG version of the font. Mobile Safari won’t even ask for a web font to be delivered if the CSS does not include this syntax, so WebINK cannot rely on just one url reference to deliver the appropriate format font to each individual browser.
You do not need to add this CSS unless you want to specifically include SVG-only browsers such as Mobile Safari in your web page support. If you do not add this CSS, be sure to include a robust fallback stack so that Mobile Safari can render your page similar to how a browser that lacks support for @font-face would.
NOTE: There have been reports that Mobile Safari does not render a page correctly (and even crashes) if the page includes multiple fonts from the same family (such as a normal style font and an italics style of the same font). This is one of the reasons we still label this support “experimental.”
Digital Asset Management tools, tips, and tricks
June 25th, 2010 by Edward Smith
This week we introduced a new resource called DAM Street Smarts. It’s an email we’ll be sending out periodically with practical, ready-to-implement tips, tricks, tools and other relevant resources.
Our first edition features a spreadsheet for use as a Metadata Planning Tool. This tool can help improve the metadata planning process or can be used to record existing schemas for training and documentation purposes.
Sign up for DAM Street Smarts and download the free Metadata Planning Tool.
WebINK welcomes Darden Studio
June 24th, 2010 by Jim Kidwell
We recently signed another great type foundry, Darden Studio, as a WebINK partner.
The Darden Studio produces a number of wonderful typefaces, including their most popular font family, Omnes.
Look for Darden Studio fonts on WebINK in the coming weeks!
WebINK – what to expect in coming weeks
June 23rd, 2010 by Jim Kidwell
Work continues on our new web font service, WebINK. We’re building new features of the product right now, and wanted to let you know what to expect in the coming weeks.
WebINK Online
We recently launched online tools where you can experiment and preview WebINK fonts. If you haven’t explored the WebINK collection online yet, check it out: http://www.extensis.com/en/WebINK/fonts/index.jsp
In future weeks we’ll expand the online features so that you can:
- Create and manage your web font collections (what we call Type Drawers)
- Generate the CSS required to use WebINK fonts on your site
- Manage and update your WebINK subscription
More Web Fonts
We’re partnering with new type foundries every week. Recently we partnered with the prominent type foundry P22, and will have a very large influx of new typefaces available on WebINK soon. Look for new fonts and foundries as we add them in the coming weeks.
Expanded Browser Support
In the very near future, we plan to add support for the Opera web browser (v10.5.3 or higher).
This will expand WebINK browser support to include:
- Internet Explorer 6 – 8
- Firefox 3.5 – 3.6
- Safari 3.1 – 5
- Chrome 4 – 5
- Opera 10.5.3
Fantastic Font Film Contest from FontGear
June 14th, 2010 by Jim Kidwell
Fancy yourself a filmmaker? Love typography? Have I got a contest for you!
Our partners over at FontGear launched a new contest today where you have the chance to win a $1000 for your film that features creative typography.
Apparently you don’t need focus on ascenders, descenders, x-height and the like to create your film. Pretty much anything that is typographically creative, and has an “obvious use of typographic concepts, subjects, themes, storylines, etc.” will do just fine.
I know that Extensis has a very large creative user base. If you’ve got a few minutes to spend with After Effects, Flash or Photoshop, you could very well be the winner.
As a side note, I’m on the judging committee. I cannot accept persuasion of any type, be it cash, promises to clean my kitchen or offers to make me some tasty bar-b-cue to sway my vote.
Best of luck! So get cracking!
New Camera Raw formats, Adobe DNG, and more in Portfolio Server 9.1.2
June 11th, 2010 by Edward Smith
This week we released a v9.1.2 update for our Portfolio Server digital asset management software and NetMediaMAX image processing engine.
The new version adds support for additional Camera Raw formats, enhanced Adobe DNG thumbnail and rendering support, and several performance and stability improvements for the Server, Web Client, and NetMediaMAX.
If you’re using Portfolio Server 9, you will want to get this update. Note that this update is for the Server and Media Engine only, requires OpenOffice.org v3.2 on the Server and Media Engine(s), and that Desktop Clients should all be running the existing 9.1.1 version.
If you don’t own Portfolio Server 9 you can try it out for free. If you’re a Portfolio standalone user, check out the updated camera raw and DNG support in the recent 8.5.5 update.
Portfolio Server update downloads and release notes available here:
http://www.extensis.com/en/support/updates/PS-9-1-2.jsp
WebINK compatible with Safari 5 and Chrome 5
June 9th, 2010 by Jim Kidwell
We’re happy to report that according to our tests, our new Web Font service WebINK is fully compatible with Apple’s Safari 5 web browser, and Google’s Chrome 5. Both represent the newest browser technologies, and include a much deeper support for CSS3 and HTML5.
Safari and Chrome are built using the WebKit rendering engine that gives developers the ability to use advanced web techniques.
WebINK now supports the following browsers:
- Internet Explorer 4 – 8
- Firefox 3.5 – 3.6
- Safari 3.1 – 5
- Chrome 4 – 5
If you use Chrome or Safari only to browse the web, you’ll benefit from everything on the web looking better, and functioning better as developers take advantage of the new, under-the-hood improvements.
Use Web Fonts from WebINK FREE
June 8th, 2010 by Jim Kidwell
Have you had a hankerin’ to try something new on your blog or website? Perhaps turn that plain-Jane typeface into something that has a little more pizazz?
Now, you can use as many fonts as you want from WebINK on your website, free of charge!
Using web fonts from WebINK, you are no longer limited to boring default fonts on your website. Use a fancy script typeface for your headlines, or perhaps a slab serif face to jazz up your company’s marketing website.
We’re looking for designers, developers and creative web folks of all types to put WebINK through it’s paces before we launch it later this fall. Have a site that needs some panache? Take WebINK for a spin. We think that you’ll like it.
WebINK fonts are free to use on any site through the end of July, 2010.
Sign up to be part of the technology preview at www.webink.com.
WebINK Brings It Online
June 4th, 2010 by Brad Dunzer
This week we rolled out our WebINK font playground as a partial preview of what’s to come.
The “font playground” – as we call it – is a place to play and experiment with fonts offered by our soon to be released web font service. Some of the current features of the playground allow you to change the font-size, font-color, line-height, letter-spacing, and background-color. But I really love the fact you can replace all of the text with your own and see how your font selections will look in your own browser.
This release is just the beginning and soon you will be able to even save off your favorite fonts into a Type Drawer to keep it all organized – or make multiple Type Drawers to really get organized. Plus a lot of other great features are coming.
So go play in the playground and stay tuned it’s going to be amazing.
