The Hickensian is the journal of Jon Hicks, one half of Hicksdesign. I say!

There are a few apps that I’m particularly enjoying using at the moment, so I thought I’d share in case any of them are news to you:

Choosy

Choosy does a seemingly simple task, and does it very well. For a start, it provides a central preference pane to choose your default browser, but its main thrust is letting you choose which browser to open a link in. You can do this either manually via a chooser display (right), or automatically depending on order of preference.

My favourite feature is ‘behaviour rules’. For example, I get emails from Opera’s internal bug tracking system, and I always want to open these in Opera, no matter what my default browser is at the time. I can now do that with one simple rule set up in Choosy!

For someone like me who still uses several browsers (mainly, but not exclusively, Safari, Chrome and Opera) it doesn’t ‘arf make life easier.

Fantastical

Quite simply, the best calendar app I’ve ever used. Its always handy (sits in the menubar), doesn’t have the vulgar leather stitched interface of iCal (yes I know about Busycal) but is small, neat, and made for humans. Yes, it still has an element of skeumorphism, but in my view its done right – just enough to make it feel warm with the distracting superflous details. As well as the mix of traditional calendar and agenda views, it allows events to be added using human language, with the calendar view filtering live as you type, and adding people and locations. Its a joy to use, and I use it as my one and only desktop calendar app.

And then, two well known apps that I continue to enjoy…

Evernote

This is still my central collection source. I’ve tried all sorts of ways over the years, but the Evernote ecosystem of desktop-web-mobile is still the winner for me. Shared notebooks works brilliantly, and they are constantly evolving the UI (such as the recent subtle Notes redesign). It all goes in here – images, PDFs, notes, draft blog posts, anything I want to remember or keep for later. Its my travel diary, design scrapbook, UI library, recipe and notes book. It was invaluable in writing The Icon Handbook:

There’s still a few niggles with Evernote – for example you can now drag a thumbnail out of the app to export it, but it does so in a format that only Evernote can read. Not really export is it? Despite a few niggles like this, I remain a big fan.

Spotify

I’ve had a on-off relationship with Spotify. In general, I treat it as a way of previewing whole albums before deciding whether to buy them, creating collaborative playlists and getting access to a large music library on my iPhone without any syncing woes.

They’ve done a few wonky things recently (such as requiring Facebook to sign up, sharing everything with Facebook by default) and since joining iTunes match (a service that I’m greatly impressed with) the latter reason is less important. However I’m enjoying a great new Spotify feature: Apps. I love the last.fm and Guardian reviews apps particularly, making it an even better place to discover new music.

YAY!!!

What a way to celebrate 10 years of Hicksdesign (to the very day) – my advance copy of The Icon Handbook arrives! I’m actually holding it in my hands! It has pages that turn with words (what I wrote) and pictures on them!

It looks and smells flippin’ gorgeous!

Excuse me, I think I need a sit down…

If you’ve been waiting for the print version to be available before purchasing, now is your time to pick up a copy!

Since publishing a section from The Icon Handbook as part of 24 Ways last December (Displaying Icons with Fonts and Data- Attributes) I’ve been involved in a few discussions regarding its cons, some of which have since gained workarounds, and it felt a good time to do a follow up post.

First of all, its worth mentioning the context of the article – it’s from Chapter 6, where all the various possible methods for deploying icons on the web are laid out. This includes creating icons with CSS, which isn’t something I’d recommend, but just may be a solution for someone out there and work well in a particular context. In the same vein, using fonts to display icons is just one of the options.

Lets go over the 2 cons that keep coming up:

Unicode Mapping

Jon Tan states (rightly) that where matching unicode characters exist, the key should be mapped to that (such as the heart symbol for Favourites) and others that don’t to Private Use Areas where they have no associated meaning or content. This isn’t a problem with the technique as much as the current implementation of the fonts. Its solvable, although doing so will add an extra layer of complexity in specifying the correct letter. There’s also not going to be many icons that can be mapped of course.

Drew Wilson has improved this situation with his release of Pictos Server – a typekit style hosted service where you can choose only the icons you want in the font, as well as what letter its mapped to. It also helps another issue with the technique – that of icon choice. Adding a new icon to a font is complex work, but with 650 to choose from, its less likely to be an issue.

Another option here is IcoMoon which allows icons to be mapped to Private Use Areas in Unicode, thereby avoiding odd content altogether.

See also:

• http://jontangerine.com/log/2010/08/web-fonts-dingbats-icons-and-unicode
• http://pictos.cc/articles/using-icon-fonts/
• http://filamentgroup.com/lab/dingbat_webfonts_accessibility_issues/

Screenreaders speak generated content

Using CSS to insert content has the side effect of the icon letter being read out by screenreaders. Not the worst accessibility issue, but confusing.

However Eric Eggert discovered that this can be avoided with the ARIA attribute: aria-hidden="true". This is required for every instance, but Eric also points out that this can be automated with a small snippet of javascript. Read Eric’s post A better way to use icon fonts. Not all screenreaders support ARIA, so it may be best avoiding the need altogether by using Private Use Areas mentioned above.

But…

For me, the biggest issue is pixel crispness. Unless you spend an awful lot of time hinting the font properly, you just won’t get the same crispness that you can achieve with a PNG.

Once everyone has high density screens this won’t be an issue, but in the meantime, I’m thinking more along the lines of SVG Sprites to implement my own icons and gain scalability.