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. Fast Company:

Steve Matteson has designed some of the most ubiquitous typefaces in the world, and engineered the original core fonts for Microsoft, adapting Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier, which you’ve probably used for term papers or resumes or anything else you wrote in Word. He has also created some less-classic designs that he’s not too proud of, such as “Curlz,” which falls in the Comic Sans camp of typefaces reserved for high school yearbooks, princess-themed birthday party invitations, and mockery.

But that is the plight of a professional font designer: One day you get to make lasting letter sets, the next you have to pay the bills. “Sometimes you have to do work that you’re not really proud of,” Matteson told Fast Company. “That’s why we call it work instead of play.”

I know literally nothing about fonts – I couldn’t point out Geneva if you put a gun to my head – but the process is endlessly fascinating to me.

Enjoy your Friday people.

A nasty surprise when the Amazon Web Services send you an email to update your credit card info to handle the charges.

This week we learned, thanks to a February 2012 internal Samsung document marked “top secret” and unearthed by Apple as part of its ongoing patent infringement proceedings, that we were right and those more credulous news outlets were wrong.

When Strategy Analytics was telling the world that Samsung sold 2 million Galaxy Tabs in six weeks, the truth was that it took Samsung all of 2011 to sell half that many.

Lying, cheating, bastards.

I just love Joe’s voice.

An interesting article by Peter Cohen on whether OS X should get more of a flat design. It makes sense to me.

This is one of my favorite apps of all time.

Next Tuesday, April 15th at 6am PDT, we’re opening up some spots in the Glass Explorer Program. Any adult in the US* can become an Explorer by visiting our site and purchasing Glass for $1500 + tax – and it now comes with your favorite shade or frame, thanks to feedback from our current Explorers. The number of spots available is limited, so mark your calendar if you want to get in.

Don’t do it.

“Apple takes security very seriously. IOS and OS X never incorporated the vulnerable software and key Web-based services were not affected,” an Apple spokesperson told Re/code.

Great news.

Amazon.com today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire comiXology, the company that revolutionized the digital comics reading experience with their immersive Guided View technology and makes discovering, buying, and reading comic books and graphic novels easier and more fun than ever before.

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Nautilus:

The light that a city emits is like its glowing fingerprint. From the orderly grid of Manhattan, to the sprawling, snaking streets of Milan, to the bright contrast of Kuwait’s ring-roads, each city leaves its own pattern of tiny glowing dots. See if you can ID these cities based on the way they shine.

I got 13 out of 16 right but I definitely guessed on at least three of them.

Yeah, I posted it.

The Fender Passport EVENT with Bluetooth® connectivity is a self-contained portable audio system that includes everything you need for great sound anywhere you go. Carry your Passport as you would a suitcase, and simply flip open the cabinet release latches when you’re ready to set it up. Inside you’ll discover two full-range speaker cabinets, a powered mixer, a microphone and all the cables you’ll need to get started.

Fender also announced a new Passport Venue.

This guy is an asshole.

Slash’s solo albums have been great. I can’t wait to hear the new release.

I really like the tone of Engl amps. I’ll be getting these amp and cabinet models.

I never thought I’d say this about an ad in the newspaper, but this is cool.

“Greg has been planning to retire later this year after nearly 20 years at Apple,” said a company spokesman. “He has made vital contributions to Apple products across the board, and built a world-class human interface team which has worked closely with Jony for many years.”

The design shakeup at Apple will result in Christie soon leaving the company, with all software designers now working directly under Ive with the rest of his industrial design team instead of within Federighi’s engineering group. Sources say that Christie’s upcoming departure is significant and stems from a falling out with Ive.

Greg Christie is an important figure at Apple and will certainly be a loss for the company, but it makes a lot of sense for all design teams to report to Jony Ive. The news would be much worse if it was Ive leaving.

Soon, you will have to download Facebook’s messaging app in order to chat with people using the service.

Minimal Sudoku is an easy to use, clutter-free classic sudoku game which is designed for iOS 7. It’s ad-free and offers different levels for everybody from casual gamers to addicted masters of sudoku.

I like minimal things. You can also purchase higher levels if you wish through an in-app purchase.

Big day for Dropbox. Mailbox for iOS and Mac:

Mailbox for Mac has been another labor of love for our team. It’s the product of painstaking iteration (over, and over, and over) to build the lightest, fastest, most delightful desktop mail client ever. You can watch a demo of the app during the Dropbox keynote (available on the Dropbox blog later today), and sign up to get early access here. We’ve still got quite a bit of work to do, but we’ll be adding people to the beta as quickly as we can.

Carousel:

We’d like you to meet Carousel: a gallery for all the photos and videos from your life. It combines the photos in your Dropbox with the photos on your phone, and automatically backs up new ones as you take them. Carousel sorts all these memories by event so you can easily travel back in time to any photo from any date. And unlike other mobile galleries, the size of your Carousel isn’t constrained by the space on your phone, which means you can finally have your entire life’s memories in one place.

. Bloomberg BusinessWeek:

For 15 years, Frere-Jones and Hoefler seemed charmed. They made typefaces that rendered the stock charts in the Wall Street Journal readable and helped Martha Stewart sell cookbooks.

In January, Frere-Jones filed a lawsuit against Hoefler, saying that their company was not actually a partnership, but a long con in which Hoefler had tricked him into signing over the rights to all of his work, cheating Frere-Jones out of his half of the business.

Sad, fascinating story. Watch the two men in happier times in the short film, “Font Men”.

Looks cool.

Instantly watch Sesame Street, Sesame Street Classics, and Pinky Dinky Doo episodes, all presented in a secure, ad-free, and child-friendly environment.

I wish this was available when my kids were young.

The user reported an error to Apple in the Maps app on April 6 and was given an option to receive a notification when the issue was resolved, with Apple sending a push notification on April 8 indicating the problem had been fixed.

That’s certainly better than having your feedback go into a black hole and never really knowing what’s going on.

I remember doing some of these things years ago when I first started using Photoshop.

We have plenty of considerations to design for when crafting web sites. Web accessibility is not a new design consideration, but is still very important, no matter the size or speed of device we’re testing on. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) tells us our content should be distinguishable and requires we “[m]ake it easier for users to see and hear content including separating foreground from background.”

The finding of the so-called “Heartbleed” vulnerability, by researchers with Google Inc and a small security firm Codenomicon, prompted the U.S. government’s Department of Homeland Security to advise businesses on Tuesday to review their servers to see if they were using vulnerable versions a type of software known as OpenSSL.

It said updates are already available to address the vulnerability in OpenSSL, which could enable remote attackers to access sensitive data including passwords and secret keys that can decode traffic as it travels across the Internet.

Sounds nasty.

Apple’s iPhone continues to grow in popularity with U.S. teenagers, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster’s latest semiannual teen survey, which asked 7,500 teens about their device preferences. 61 percent of teens now own an iPhone, compared to 55 percent from a survey conducted in October 2013 and 40 percent in the fall of 2012.

Get them while they’re young and they will be with you for a long time.