[design, tech] Two Big Announcments

Type designers and web designers alike have things to think about now, as two big names bring themselves up to new current versions.

Fontlab, Ltd licensed the code for Macromedia's Fontographer some months back. Fontographer, one of the big guns in the desktop font design world, went into extended hibernation with respect to the Macintosh some eight or ten years ago, but despite only being runnable under OS 9 was still quite popular.

Fontographer for Mac OS X has finally arrived (link to my announcement on Designorati) And, to further fuel Mac OS X smugness, is at version 4.7 for Mac users only . . . Wintellers only get a version 4.1.5. You can check 'em out here.

Naturally, the real big news of the day (in some people's opinions, anyway) is the release of Firefox 1.5. (Firefox 1.5, Madge? Yes, you're posting in it!) There are improvments such as drag and drop tab shuffling, redesigned preferences, auto updating, new options to clear personal data, more standards-compliant stuff. After falling in love with Safari when I finally got a Mac I got Firefox and it's gotten good enough that it's now my default browser. I still wish they'd beef up RSS handling; "Live Bookmarks" are a poor substitute (I have Opera for reading my feeds).
You can download it from Mozilla.com here.