Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Episode 20: Fonts and Audio

Tor and Chet talk with Raph Levien from the Android UI Toolkit team, who works on font technology for Android. The conversation wanders freely into areas such as Raph's creation of the Inconsolata font, his work on Ghostscript, and tinkering he's done with audio latency and Android synthesizer apps. Oh, and we also talk about fonts, including some big improvements to font support in the Android 5.0 Lollipop release.

We also learned some new terminology along the way: glitch (the audio equivalent of jank in the graphics and UI world) and pangram (a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet). So, bonus points for educational content.

Subscribe to the podcast feed or download the audio file directly.


Relevant Links:

Inconsolatahttp://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html
Ghostscripthttp://www.ghostscript.com/
Robotohttp://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto
Noto fontshttps://www.google.com/get/noto/
Synthesizer App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.levien.synthesizer
Synthesizer Source: https://github.com/raphlinus/music-synthesizer-for-android
High Performance Audio on Android (Google I/O 2013): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3kfEeMZ65c

Raphgoogle.com/+RaphLevien
Torgoogle.com/+TorNorbye
Chetgoogle.com/+ChetHaase