Tag palm

Palm's Comeback

Jon Rubinstein is no stranger to success. He was the engineer that architected the iPod, Apple’s single most successful product for years, until the iPhone was released in 2007. After more than fifteen years working with Steve Jobs, Jon Rubinstein left Apple in 2006. Around ten years earlier he had returned to the company with […]

Hellenic in Prelude: Font Design Failure

Prelude is the font bundled with WebOS in HP/Palm’s Palm Pre. I first saw it, and wrote about it, last summer, a bit after the device went on sale. Back then I wrote that the font was fantastic, but didn’t include any non-Roman characters. Apparently I was wrong. Eighteen months passed since then, a time […]

For a hacker, the Pre is incredible

Great stuff. Perhaps I should start looking at the Pre as one of the candidate platforms for the Geo|Ads platform and the apps it is currently featured on. Since AthensBook 1.0.0 came out in early March we've been focusing on way too many things and looking at what Palm has to one of them --- besides registering for the early SDK access back in April, there were few reasons to focus on the Pre: it is only available stateside for now, and we're already focusing on providing current releases of our apps and ad SDK on iPhone/Android and Blackberry. Still, with Android still featuring a decade-old UI and no devices not being available in Hellas in any sort of mainstream way yet [soon that's bound to change of course] and with the BlackBerry OS seeming increasingly dated, perhaps the Pre should be getting some more developer love from us. If only we could get a device in this part of the world. =)

Palm Pre's Custom Font 'Prelude'

While the Palm Pre is intriguing in many respects, I am not particularly excited about its User Interface; it's modern and has that 'new' feel that seems to be gone from the iPhone [something Android never had] and it seems sophisticated and well-designed from a usability point of view, but it also seems somewhat busy and over-the-top æsthetically. One of the things that did catch my eye, however, is the new font that the Pre includes. Very similar to Avenir, the font, apparently called Prelude, is a sans-serif design with good readability and a look that makes it distinguishable from many other fonts in use in modern operating systems today. There are various reports online stating that Prelude does not support non-Roman character sets, such as Hellenic, Cyrillic, or East-asian. I'm not even sure how good its support is for Central European languages either. If this is true, it strikes me as very naive on Palm's part: given that this is a font that was custom designed in 2008 (?) for a product that's bound to be internationally sold, proper international character support should've been a high priority. If anything the omission will make the Pre much less attractive to customers outside of North America and Western Europe, something that other companies learnt the hard way over the years. Hopefully Palm won't have to do so too.

Nokia is The Past. Welcome to the Future.

I have written about Nokia and the need for the company to reinvent itself several times in the past. When the iPhone was announced in early 2007, I was lukewarm and slightly frustrated that the Mac, Apple’s former, at times sole and by far most important strategic product was complemented by a formidable ‘opponent’. I […]