Gruber at Daring Fireball links to DropClock, a screen saver “featuring Helvetica Bold numbers dropping into water in super-slow-motion.”
I’m sure there’s people who will appreciate this, but I haven’t downloaded it — at 100MB and $15, I feel like the press in Deep Space Homer ((“Is this a joke?” … “No really, is this a joke?”)).
But I think DropClock also deserves some special mention for generating the most horrible subpixel rendering of any web page ever for the all-caps description at the top of the page. I’m still trying to figure out how they managed this. Is this a Flash “feature”?
Wouldn’t the text inside of Flash be rendered using Adobe’s own CoolType subpixel rendering system? Sort of like how the text in Photoshop is?
CoolType is closer to ClearType than Quartz is, so that would explain why it looks like that. Personally, for light-on-dark I think Apple’s system does a bit poorly.
It certainly doesn’t do as well when compared to black on white text, but comparing Daring Fireball to the DropClock page, you have a similar colour scheme but radically different rendering. Daring Fireball (Quartz) is crisp and clear, but DropClock (CoolType) is full of brutally bright colors. I think it’d be fair to say CoolType doesn’t work at all on this monitor — but perhaps this monitor is somehow weird.
You know, what it really looks like to me is that Flash is using the wrong subpixel ordering.
Certainly the credits on the bottom of that page are a joke: They didn’t really film this, did they?! Can’t you do this with advanced 3D programs? Did they machine big Helvetica letters and literally drop them?
The site is developed by a Japanese design company. I can never get Japanese Flash sites to display without bakemoji on the Mac, either in Safari or Firefox. A friend here in Japan tells me that if I reset my system to Japanese, it should display properly (I tried it, but it didn’t, but I may need to reboot to see the results).
At any rate, perhaps there is something freaky about Japanese Flash that is causing the problem? For instance, maybe it’s expecting right to left letters, and maybe through some freaky bug it reverses the subpixel rendering? (Not likely, since more horizontal Japanese is written left to right these days, but maybe something like that …)
Sure you could render it, but unless you had some serious computing power it would probably takes less time to machine big letters and drop/film it!