Brilliant Typography

Visit Timba Smits for a dose of typographic inspiration.
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Free Font - Ostrich

Font Squirrel is hosting this condensed, caps-only display typeface family, featuring light, regular and black weights, along with a weird 'inline-esque' bold, plus dashed and rounded versions.


The font's license appears to permit @font-face css embedding
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Lytro

AllThingsD reports: [edited]

A Mountain View start-up is promising that its camera, due later this year, will bring the biggest change to photography since the transition from film to digital.

The breakthrough is a different type of sensor that captures what are known as light fields, basically all the light that is moving in all directions in the view of the camera. That offers several advantages over traditional photography, the most revolutionary of which is that photos no longer need to be focused before they are taken.

That means that capturing that perfect shot of your fast-moving pet or squirming child could soon get a whole lot easier. Instead of having to manually focus or wait for autofocus to kick in and hopefully centre on the right thing, pictures can be taken immediately and in rapid succession.

Once the picture is on a computer or phone, the focus can be adjusted to centre on any object in the image, also allowing for cool artsy shots where one shifts between a blurry foreground and sharp background and vice versa.

The technology also allows photos to be taken in very low-light conditions without a flash as well as for three-dimensional images to be captured with a single lens. To view photos in full 3D, users still need some sort of 3D display, such as a 3D-enabled phone, PC or television.

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Brett's 2p'orth: If you have any interest in photography, it is worth visiting the site to read the complete article and check out some of the demo images. The video is dull, but informative.

There is another video review available here. (via kate)


thanks to Conrad for the link.
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Free Font - OSP DIN

A useful compressed 'industrial' sans serif. Licensed for @font-face css embedding. Available from Font Squirrel.

Nik Snapseed for iPad

Digital Photography Review have posted a Quick Review of Nik's photo editing App.

Edited conclusions:

If you're serious about photo editing, you'll appreciate the U Point technology, and the fine-grained control over key adjustment parameters. If, on the other hand, you only use your iPad to prepare snapshots for uploading to the web, you'll love the ease with which you can apply fun creative effects to your images, and the speed with which you can send them on their way, via the integrated Facebook and flickr uploaders.

On an iPad 2, Snapseed is extremely quick and very smooth in operation, too. The only action that takes longer than a moment is opening large image files to begin editing, but even this is achieved in a couple of seconds.

At £2.99, Snapseed is a steal, but there are a couple of things we'd like to see included in future updates. Like many photography applications, Snapseed is hamstrung slightly by the fact that you can't zoom into images to see the pixel-level effects of your adjustments. This isn't a problem most of the time, but when adding texture effects and grain filters, it does mean that you have almost no idea about how images will actually look close-up until they've been saved.

We'd also love to see some batch editing functionality added, but right now, it seems churlish to complain. In its current form Snapseed is a must-have photography app, and Nik should be congratulated for making its first iteration so effective, and so much fun to use.
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Fontstruct

FontShop reports: [edited]

FontStruct is a free font-building tool that lets you quickly and easily create fonts constructed out of geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks.

FontStruct generates high-quality TrueType fonts, ready to use in any Mac or Windows application.

You can keep your creations to yourself, but we encourage users to share their "FontStructions". Explore the Gallery of fonts made by other FontStruct users and download them or even copy them and make your variations.
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Sony NEX-C3

Digital Photography Review reports: [edited]

The NEX-C3 is the start of Sony's second generation of mirrorless cameras, following the introduction of the 14MP NEX-3 and NEX-5. If these first two models showed how committed Sony is to offering APS-C capabilities in a compact form factor, the point is underlined by the arrival of the still-smaller C3.

The NEX-C3, even more than its predecessors, underlines the company's desire to offer this blend of compact camera convenience with large sensor image quality. Despite its larger sensor, the C3 challenges the smallest Micro Four Thirds models in terms of size, with only its kit zoom limiting its compactness.

The big news, beyond the NEX-C3's reduced size, is the inclusion of a 16MP sensor. This isn't exactly the same sensor used to such great effect in the Sony A55 (amongst others), but a re-engineered version designed to offer improved power consumption, with the promise of lower image noise and improved temperature characteristics as a result.

Just as Panasonic has decided to shrink and simplify its G and GF-series cameras, Sony is clearly trying to attract customers who want DSLR quality but wouldn't consider lugging a big black lump of camera around, and who are more interested in taking good pictures than learning what f-numbers mean.
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iCloud, iOS 5 & OS X Lion

iCloud is coming... and, at first glance, it would appear to be a very good thing for anyone who runs more than one Apple product.

iOS 5 sees Apple's mobile OS integrating Twitter (meh...) and improving its notification system (hurrah!).

OS X Lion will only be available by download, for $30/£21, supports multi-touch gestures, autosave, auto-resume and an improved version of Mail.

To view a range of excellent explanatory videos, or watch the entire keynote speech click here.
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