Well they say the iPad is the future of publishing, so it was only a matter of time before it colonised the past too. John Bonadies’s new project on Kickstarter aims to purchase a shedload of lovely old letterpress type to be digitised, and allow iPad users to make their own virtual letterpress compositions.

These can be used to generate images on the iPad itself for emailing and such, but the really interesting part is that it sounds like the system might eventually let you order an actual letterpress print of your design, and it is planned to hit other platforms such as the Mac soon afterwards.

They’ve got 25% of their $15,000 funding as I write this, and you can join in for as little as $1. Buying a guy on the internet a lovely letterpress collection is a bit like giving somebody else a load of money to go to Disneyland and send you the pictures, but they seem to have some nice open plans for sharing the type as a resource in the future, which hopefully means everyone will see some benefit.

Still, if I could persuade the internet to buy me a DeLorean that would be fantastic.

Letterpress is so specialist now that it has moved beyond the reach of most people who might be casually interested, or only modestly financed, so this is a nice way to open it up a bit. It could also be a great educational tool to teach classes about the history of type and let them get their virtual hands inky.

Head over to Kickstarter and donate some capital. Capital, geddit?

Photoshop in real life. Lovely attention to detail! Apparently it’s part of an ad campaign for something called CS4…

Seen over at Swiss Miss, originally uploaded to Flickr by wandaaa, so you can see it larger over there…

I’m happy arrogantly assuming that people reading this might like to know what my 10 favourite iPhone apps are. So if you do, read on. If not, then feel free to leave a comment and tell me what I’m missing out on. Perhaps you’re just curious as to why the title of this post is ‘My 10 favourite iPhone apps’ and there are 11 icons here…

Read the rest of this entry…

Today was the day that iPhone enthusiasts and would-be developers were waiting for as Apple unveiled the long-awaited Software Development Kit and outlined its plans for 3rd party software on the device.

Most notably for me were the demos of Will Wright’s eagerly anticipated Spore, and Sega’s Super Monkey Ball.

I’m going to find it REALLY hard to hold out for the iPhone v2 now…

More details at MacRumors and iPhone Alley…

This mod for GTA: Vice City looks amazing! It’s a real shame that as a non-PC user I won’t be driving my DeLorean round Vice City anytime soon, but for all you Windows users, it should come as some small consolation…

It makes me realise I’d love to see a great Back to the Future videogame, where you could drive the DeLorean around and manipulate events, a bit like the old Time Machine game from the 90s which I loved. The nearest we’ve got so far apart from the retro offerings, is the awful Universal Studios game originally for Gamecube. For now, stick with the Japanese SNES effort, Super Back to the Future 2…

Al Gore wins Nobel Prize for not using PowerPoint

OK, well not quite, but there should be a prize for that. Al Gore has actually been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) for their work on raising awareness of global warming and climate change.

Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth was mainly put together using Apple’s Keynote application, the company’s answer to the evil that is Microsoft PowerPoint. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, as in addition to Keynote obviously being superior to PowerPoint, Mr Gore is actually a member of Apple’s Board of Directors.

An Inconvenient Truth was a great documentary film and has just this week been cleared to be shown in UK schools, on the condition that the audiences are made aware of nine scientific errors in the film, and have it made clear that there is “a view to the contrary”…

Apparently, now he might actually make it to the White House, perhaps he’ll install iMacs in the Oval Office.