Just a quick reminder to all of the screen typesetters – not everyone have font smoothing enabled/adjusted on their systems. With the Regulars, we can’t do much about it, we simply have to use them. However, you might want to consider alternatives to use of the Italics for the body text set at smaller sizes. See the screenshot.

This one is for experienced Mac owners… I’m rethinking my shopping list for this season and considering buying a Mac for home. I’d like to know pros and cons for the following competitors – Powermac 2GHz Dual Core G5 (assume I already have a screen) and Powerbook 15in 1.67GHz G4 Widescreen.

$2000 is the limit at this point, so more expensive models are out of question. If I’m taking, I’m taking one of the above.

I already have both Mac and PC at work and PC at home. All machines are way above average considering performance, so I’m not switching all of my work to Macs, but someday maybe I will.

How often you really needed mobility and how often you really needed the power of dual processors? Link to any useful article would also help.

As much as I’m proud of the Typetester’s popularity and the recent revival of typography for screen, there’s still significant number of web designers, who are confused about the TT’s base font size. Until I place default sizing control into TT’s interface, here’s a quick clarification. The base size control is now added.

The base font size of the TT is 10px, which means 1em is 10px, 1.2em is 12px and so on.

The ems for the screen are actually multipliers of the document’s base font size. The good practice is to set document’s font size to 10px (or if you want it to be resizable by the Internet Explorer users, set it to 62.5%).

body { font-size: 62.5%; }

Once you fix your global sizing (which is 16px by default in most of today’s graphic user agents), it’s easy to multiply textual elements with ems.

body { font-size: 62.5%;  /* 16px × 62.5% = 10px */ }
h1 { font-size: 2em; /* 10px × 2em = 20px */ }
p { font-size: 1.2em; /* 10px × 1.2em = 12px */ }
...

The reason behind setting the body element’s font size to 10px, is the ease of multiplying everything else with round number 10. If we’d set font size to 16px (or 100%, or not set it up altogether), the 1.1em would be 17.6px, which is pretty nasty number to work with, since the screen can’t display 0.6 of a pixel.

Still not convinced? Try calculating what would be font size in ems, if we’d want our heading in 18px?

A week ago the missus and I went to the movie to watch a Michael Bay film The Island with Evan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson.

Apart from us both being fans of the minimal interior design in the small city on the beginning of the story, we especially adored the Black Wasp (photos: 1, 2) flying motorbike-like vehicle driven by the bad guys.

Screenshot is taken from the official web site .

Those nasty black interceptors reminded me again on the excellent design by Tim Cameron, whose motorbikes are still rotating on my screen at home.

Speaking of which, we’re currently waiting for our new car, the New Colt (5 door family variant). Some more pictures, once we get it, will be posted.

So far, I never had a need to chat via Mac, since the Skype covers it both – Win and Mac systems alike. What would be your Mac messenger of choice and why? Do Mac people generally practice instant messaging, or are they more the e-mail type?

Alen went solo, and he’s giving away XHTML+CSS template if you win a little contest. See more at the Pixelpusher blog.