So, Medium tried a new thing on their website in which they render the site in system fonts – San Francisco, Roboto, Segoe – but soon they started getting bug reports from people about Medium showing blocky, pixellated fonts.
I looked again at all the system fonts and none seemed to match any of the descriptions. What was going on? I started asking for screenshots, and eventually a few trickled in.
And, suddenly, I realized I know this font. It was a font I saw on my first PC.
I love this story.
So, let me check this… the guys changed their site CSS with some neat tricks, and none of them bothered to test it on Windows?
I know most design companies love Apple and all, but… c’mon guys, basic testing, please?
Yes, let’s not bother testing with the most ubiquitous desktop OS on the planet at all. Gah !
What probably happened was that they tested everything and than changed that one line which broke it.
Because everyone knowns just changing a single line of code never breaks anything. 😉
Yeah,I’m not a “font” guy, who normally cares about such things, but come on system? Really? Even I remember the system font.
And so maybe you have a brain fart and you had too many new fonts in your brain that you forget about the 3.1 options, but not testing windows? Holy terrible development strategy batman!
So Apple uses “magic” font-names and even more magic “system-font” designations but the tester catches those.
Than they try to extrapolate that magical (experimental) system-font to the future but instead get a clash from the past that they didn’t test.
I am not surprised that they are only testing on Apple, but I am surprised that nobody points the finger at Apple to point out how their experimental feature breaks the web
Seriously, great catch, good laugh, nice explanation of what happened and why and even a reference to the old new thing
I thought the story was about the font used in System Shock, the game!
Related to the story, I think these guys should prepend “sans-serif” to the list, not append it.
What impressed me was that the guy telling the story, not only told us the problems he had and the nostalgia he felt when looking the old fonts getting back to life; but he built a vector “System” font to be rendered in modern OSes. It is a very nice bonus and it shows us we can give more than 0.02 on every thing we do.
Thanks!
There’s nothing worth telling about this story.
Anyone who’s spent a few hours working with CSS could have told them beforehand they were doing it wrong.
Just making up generic font names and putting them ahead of the list was really stupid.
Frankly, they should be ashamed of what they did, not bragging about it.
Move fast and something something, I guess.
Making mistakes is the only way of learning; the guy here shared the lessons and that is valuable per se.
Calling him stupid sounds arrogant to me.
He wasn’t calling the guy stupid. He said it was a stupid mistake that an experienced CSS person wouldn’t have made.
It’s an amusing story, but it also points out the creators of the app didn’t have a very professional way of producing it. An Apple shop decides to make an (apparently) Apple oriented application cross platform but neglects to actually test it on the most popular platforms it’s likely to be used on, namely Windows desktops.
This should be a note of caution to any new programmers out there to avoid ecosystem echo chambers whether it’s Microsoft, Apple, or Android/Linux.
Did I read it wrong, or are they talking about a website, not an app?
making such “clever” assumptions may not be stupid, but not testing on Windows at all, this IS stupid.