Many interesting things were announced today at Google’s annual I/O keynote and meeting. Google “Wave” is now open to the public with no invite necessary. That should attract more users and get some “network” effect going, making it a more useful service. Another little one, kind of under the radar, is the availability of some custom fonts, free and open source, that you can easily grab the code for with a few snippets and apply to your webpage/blog. This is useful for design purposes and to have a little fun being creative with your page. I grabbed one already and applied it my header “Stephen Pickering” up there. What’s nice is, besides the fact that they are royalty free and open sourced, that since Google is hosting them on their own servers, the fonts will render properly on any “Modern” browser. I just checked on Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, and my header rendered correctly. Not sure about IE, since I don’t have it. Before, if you applied custom fonts to your page, more than likely other browsers wouldn’t render it, as they only support a few of the main fonts that are commonly used. But the Google servers make sure the code is there for most of the browsers to render it. Didn’t work on my iPad, however. I still don’t understand or like the fact that the iPad uses a “mobile” browser. Very lame on Apple’s part. Flash notwithstanding, the screen real estate is large enough on a tablet, that one should expect a more robust browsing experience.
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