When it comes down to whether to use a serif or a sans-serif font in a design, many people choose by taste. But from time to time you’ll meet someone who tells you that serif-based fonts are more readable due to various reasons.

My typography teacher, for example, always used to tell me that serifs were more readable than sans-serif fonts because serifs are used to guide the flow of the eye. I, up to now, always believed this and thus often chose to use serif fonts for those layouts where informational purposes stood in the foreground.

I just found this interesting article from Alex Poole who spend a lot of time researching whether the above statement, and others, are true.

The result is interesting, to say the least, and should be known to anybody who frequently uses serif fonts as he believes that they enhance readability.

Alex Poole – Literature Review – Serif vs. Sans Serif Legibility

From TUAW via Sunday Times

The british Sunday Times listed the 25 most influential expatriates in America. Jonathen Ive made the third place, as he has “shaken up two industires – music and electronics”

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

A new version of the VLC Mediaplayer has been released.

This new release features many improvements including a new VLC cone, new Mac OS X wizard and extend controls dialogs, tree playlist skins2 support, HTTP interface CGI handling, linux binary codecs loader, UPnP and Bonjour service discovery, shoutcast stream forwarding, new languages …

VideoLAN – Free Software and Open Source video streaming solution for every OS!

Firefox 1.5 has been released!

The award-winning Web browser is better than ever. Browse the Web with confidence – Firefox protects you from viruses, spyware and pop-ups. Enjoy improvements to performance, ease of use and privacy.

Apart from the new usability, security, privacy and performance enahcnements there are some added improvements with respect to web development. We reported about this earlier.

Fetch it!

Firefox – Rediscover the web

There’s a new article on MacDevCenter which explains various HTML Tools on the Mac OS X commandline (read: Terminal.app).

CLI Tools (especially on unix-based systems) have a high amount of features which can be utilized to solve certain specific tasks via shell- or apple-scripts. Even Automator allows to include cli tools into it’s workflows.

This MacDevCenter Article explains how to use some tools so you can modify or create html-files on the fly.

MacDevCenter.com: HTML Tools on the Mac Command Line