There's no particular reason for me to post this today, instead of any other day, but I wanted to tell you about one of my favorite tools — WhatFont by Chengyin Liu. Install it in your browser. Click and see what typefaces a website is using. It's free. It's insanely handy. I use it constantly.
What is the easiest way to find out the fonts used in a webpage? Firebug or Webkit Inspector? No, that's too complicated. It should be just a click away. Hence I wrote WhatFont, with which you can easily get font information about the text you are hovering on.
Aug 17, 2014 – 5:10pm EDT
William Deresiewicz for Slate.com
If you want a good education, you need to have good teachers. It seems ridiculous to have to say as much, but such is the state that matters have reached, both in academia and in the public conversation that surrounds it, that apparently we do. Between the long-term trend toward the use of adjuncts and other part-time faculty and the recent rush to online instruction, we seem to be deciding that we can do without teachers in college altogether, at least in any meaningful sense. But the kind of learning that college is for is simply not possible without them.
Teaching is not an engineering problem. It isn’t a question of transferring a certain quantity of information from one brain to another. “Educate” means “lead forth.” A teacher’s job is to lead forth the powers that lie asleep within [their] students.
Education is a running theme on The Web Ahead. How do we learn? What resources are out there? Do you really need to go to college? This article hits on something I believe in deeply, but haven't said enough on the show — there is a deep, unreplaceable experience that you have at a real college.
The rapid decline in our society valuing a college education is alarming to me. There is something that happens when you go away to college, and study with real professors. Something that can't be replicated by robots.
You know great teaching the moment you encounter it. Yes, you feel, this is it—this is what I came for. It reaches deep inside you. It satisfies desires that you didn’t know you had. It makes the world feel newly large and meaningful—exactly, again, like art.
Aug 15, 2014 – 12:00am EDT
Tobias Frere-Jones.
Typography.
New York City.
What else could you want? I'll be there. Wed Sept 17.
If you are there too, come say hi.
Aug 11, 2014 – 11:07pm EDT
Full keyboard access isn't enabled by default in Mac OS. Often this leaves developers thinking there is something wrong with the implementation of keyboard access for a site or application, when in fact it is just a matter of changing a few system and browser preferences.
Aug 11, 2014 – 10:44pm EDT
Dudley Storey:
Keyboard control is the most common alternate interaction mode for sites, one vital for users with coordination and control challenges and those who desire optimized use of web apps. It’s also probably the most overlooked aspect of modern UI design. This is ironic, given that creating keyboard accessibility is straightforward if you pay attention to just a few rules.
Aug 11, 2014 – 10:41pm EDT
Bret Victor, presenting at DBX conference:
The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think that you know what you're doing. Because once you think you know what you're doing you stop looking around for other ways of doing things and you stop being able to see other ways of doing things. You become blind… I think you have to say: "We don't know what programming is. We don't know what computing is. We don't even know what a computer is." And once you truly understand that, and once you truly believe that, then you're free, and you can think anything.
Aug 11, 2014 – 10:04pm EDT
Rarely is something so brilliant and so piercing about the cultural, political and economic issues that control the future of the web.
Jun 1, 2014 – 12:00am EDT
