Lose Your Mind Development

This is a neat poster I came across by way of downloadsquad.com. It is the Periodic Table of Typefaces.

This poster displays many familiar fonts that you know and love (or not). Print this up on high quality paper, tack it to the wall and marvel at your uncanny power of instant typeface recognition. Ooo! Look! There is Minion! And Futura! It even contains favorites from the early Mac OS.

Click the image for the full size version.

Periodic Table of Typefaces

Lose Your Mind Development offers a generous 35% commission for sales of Printer’s Apprentice.

So if you run a software directory, publish a blog about fonts/software/design/etc, or just like to recommend good software to friends and associates, you can earn money from your referrals.

The affiliate program is operated by our ecommerce provider, Avangate. Complete details about the program can be found here:

http://www.avangate.com/affiliates/affiliate-network.php

To sign up for the program, use the following link:

https://secure.avangate.com/affiliates/sign-up.php?merchant=LOSEYOUR

Avangate provides top-notch online tools for creating product links that result in money in your pocket. The Lose Your Mind Development vendor page at Avangate also includes plenty of screenshots and promotional text for Printer’s Apprentice.

If you have any questions, let me know.

Bryan
helpdesk at lose your mind dot com.

Things have been quiet on the blog for a while. But that does not mean we are not working on Printer’s Apprentice!

Behind the scenes, I’ve been continuing work on Printer’s Apprentice. Most of the work is on stability improvements for the software. A few users have come up with scenarios that crash the software. So I’m working on those issues.

I hope to have a new release out before the end of December. If you have encountered any crashes or you have suggestions for improvement, please shoot me an email at helpdesk at lose your mind dot com. — Bryan

Our software was recently featured in the “Apps we love” column in The Globe and Mail newspaper (Toronto, Canada). From the article:

“The shareware font manager has all the important features a designer needs to efficiently manage fonts: the ability to preview both installed fonts and uninstalled font files, to view and compare several different typefaces, and to print out contact sheets for some or all of your fonts, so you can browse through your font collection on paper as well as on screen.”

“…and Printer’s Apprentice is still a major improvement over the standard Windows interface.”

Apps we love – Wesley Fok – October 10, 2008

Thanks for the spotlight, Wesley.

 
Lose Your Mind Development is pleased to announce that we are partnering with Avangate for our ecommerce and online fulfillment. We found that the Avangate ecommerce platform offers our customers a superior, secure payment system. And it provides us with an excellent platform for processing orders and increasing sales.

Avangate also provides an excellent affiliate program. Lose Your Mind Development offers a generous commission (35%)  for sales generated by affiliates. More information can be found on our sign up page.

https://secure.avangate.com/affiliates/sign-up.php?merchant=LOSEYOUR

Avangate is a member of several industry groups including the Association for Shareware Professionals (ASP) and the Organization of Independent Software Vendors (OISV).

I use the crusty old Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 for managing my digital photo collection. When I first started using it back in 2005, I went a bit overboard with tagging my photos. Of course, the thrill of tags wore off once I realized how much time was going down the drain.

So I was pretty excited when I read that Google was updating their Picasa application to use facial recognition technology to assist with tagging.

Unfortunately, the recognition feature is not in the Picasa 3 application, but rather the Picasa Web Albums site itself. So you have to use a web app to identify faces.

Here is the full announcement from Google and a presentation on the “name tags” feature.

Perhaps the next version of Windows Live Photo Gallery will automatically tag the faces…

The web site redesign was finished and posted a few days ago. The design is rather stark. But the restructured HTML and CSS will make it very easy to add more flair later.

Now, back to work on Printer’s Apprentice code. — Bryan

Work on Printer’s Apprentice 8.0 has been put on the back burner for just a bit while I rework the web site. There are a couple of reasons for doing this.

1. I want to improve the customer experience. 
2. The HTML and CSS needs to be more standard complient. The existing code does not look so hot when viewed with Firefox and other newer browsers.
3. The site looked good back in 2002. But the cosmetics simply don’t hold up against the bright gradients, polished round-corner, CSS-driven sites of late 2006.  Besides, I’m simply tired of how the site looks.

Revisiting a past project is also a good way to see how much you have learned! The old site has mis-matched tags and poor CSS all over the place. And I hand-coded the thing. So I can’t blame FrontPage for maligning my HTML!

The site currently uses traditional (classic?) ASP. I resisted the urge to redo the site using ASP.NET 2.0 simply because I can’t find any compelling reason to recode the whole thing. So hopefully this effort will not take to long. — Bryan

This is a new blog. The purpose is to document various projects at Lose Your Mind Development.