Two years after Guitar Rig 3 was released in autumn 2007, the fourth iteration of the software modelling application for guitarists was released by Native Instruments. This time around a combination of an ever increasing workload, little free time and the fact that Guitar Rig 3 was ‘good enough’ for my needs meant it took me a while before deciding to buy Guitar Rig 4.

A special offer by Native Instruments landing in my email inbox a few weeks ago, some free time to play the guitar — after weeks of not touching it — and the ease of buying software online meant that Guitar Rig 4 was running on my MacBook Pro in no time.

This release is the first one that dropped support for Power PC Macintosh computers, around three and a half years after Apple stopped selling them. There is no good reason for this change, Guitar Rig 4 would run comfortably on PowerMac G5s and maybe even the last generation of PowerPC-based iMacs.
»

Just a few weeks (?) before the rumoured availability of the Apple tablet (whatever its name is), here’s a recent demonstration of what the display, miniature electronics and battery technology may lead to in the near future in the context of magazines. If everything that we’ve heard about the impending release of the Apple tablet is true, I guess there’s a chance that the paper magazine may soon follow the CD and DVD as items of yesteryear. If anything, I am excited about the ecological, typographical and æsthetic consequences such a device might bring, but also somewhat concerned about the loss of the openness that the web has brought us in the last fifteen years or so. [via Mosh].

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Update: Here’s another video featuring a tablet version of Sports Illustrated.

Sports Illustrated – Tablet Demo 1.5 from The Wonderfactory on Vimeo.

One of the most impressive and original groups that I’ve listened to in the past few years, I’ve been meaning to write something more substantial about this for ages, but never got around to doing it. Difficult, but warm, exceptionally rich in sounds and meaning and at the same time simple, even minimalist in structure, but above all uncategorisable, The Books [on Wikipedia] make music that I’ve come to love more than most in the few years that I’ve been aware of them. It’s not just the rhythmic patterns, the exceptional sampling of natural sounds, the vocals and dialogues, the instruments that are presented in such a subtle, refined way, but the extreme attention to detail and extremely artful manner in which effects, speech samples, sounds and acoustic instruments come together in a glorious reminder of how great real music can be, no matter whether it is the result of natural or artificial means. This is not a band keen on posturing or interested in demonstrating technical prowess; their music is timeless precisely because it focuses on what matters and does away with trends. The music of The Books has soul, but at the same time retains a musical sophistication that’s rare. Open minds and open ears required.

To say that I’m no fan of Quentin Tarantino is no exaggeration. I find Tarantino gifted, but the gift lies not in his direction, his cinematography or his script-writing: it is his deep knowledge of the cinema and a twisted sense of æsthetics, ethics and bold storytelling fascinate and engage audiences and critics alike. But are his films worthy of the praise and celebration they’ve garnered over the years?

I think not. While Reservoir Dogs and, to a lesser extent, Pulp Fiction, introduced a fresh, raw perspective on crime films, a style that subsequently became Tarantino’s trademark, all of his later works, with the exception perhaps of Jackie Brown, were mediocre and shallow entertainment.

Inglourious Basterds is no exception. It is a very entertaining movie that satisfies a viewer watching it, having come to the theatre with zero expectations; it’s fun and easy to watch, its characters caricatures, more suited to a comic rather than a film, but nevertheless likeable and entertaining. But it’s far from what Tarantino subtly tries to make it: a big movie worthy of any sort of presence in Cannes, a brilliant story, whose script was worked upon for more than a decade, an epic portraying Tarantino’s idea of the racial and sociological status quo in World War II France. Basterds is not even close to evoking any sentiment or engaging the audience in this respect.
»

Æsthetics and usability go hand in hand. Because many people are visual beings, they function better when they work in a beautiful environment. And that extends to computing. So those two go together.

In typography this is pretty obvious whenever you’ve got to use (even for a short while) a Windows machine: Cleartype, now the default anti-aliasing technique employed by Microsoft, is a hideous, ugly and largely unusable (to me at least) hinting/anti-aliasing technique used by Redmond that’s supposed to make text more legible. I’m writing ’supposed’ because it doesn’t (at least for me); it never did, but in the process it does succeed into making text look extremely ugly.

What’s surprising is not that Microsoft is not ‘getting’ it. No, that’s pretty well known; it’s no accident that Apple has gone with a much more reasonable approach in OS X (which is, to my eyes, equally legible, but far more beautiful). Which is why you can actually have far superior hinting and still retain the original glyphs, as is evidenced by Adobe’s Reader. Which is why even freetype provides excellent anti-aliasing [even if it's still bugridden and at the same time many linux distributions insist on turning on full-hinting, probably the worst choice they could make].

What is really surprising here is this:

Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer will default in some cases to using ClearType rendering. Some applications that use fonts tuned for ClearType and not bi-level rendering may choose ClearType rendering to maintain the benefits of the font designs. Some applications need higher precision glyph widths like sub-pixel positioning or “natural width ClearType,” and would reflow if they were changed to bi-level or grayscale rendering. Other applications like Adobe Reader have their own built-in text rendering engine that is independent of the Windows graphics platforms. Likewise, platforms like Java on Windows also use their own rendering techniques.

Ok, so you can have applications that have their own rendering engines and don’t want to do anything with ClearType (understandable). But having everyday applications such as Internet Explorer or Office applications being capable of overriding user preferences, only because Microsoft insists on doing simple things in such a complex, backwards manner is perplexing. It’s one thing being clueless, inept, having an ingrained, institutional one might say, sense of kitsch æsthetics, creating fonts for a totally inferior technology and in the process creating a bunch of problems throughout your platform and it’s a wholly different thing when those things turn into an inability to honour user preferences. Totally mad design decisions and a poor system design on the whole.

Having said that, up until lately Apple had its fair share of problems with typography on OS X (incomplete support for non-roman characters, OpenType issues, etc.) and linux is in a laughable state with pango, fontconfig and friends failing to provide a solid foundation that would support high-end uses in the publishing industry (a nice example would be the total clusterfuck that results when you try to use commercial fonts with many styles). But at least there no one pretends that they know better; they move forward, try and fix what’s wrong and create better software; Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to be doing exactly the opposite, at least as far as typography is concerned.