Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 10:11 GMT
"users have tried to change their phone font and have broken their phone in the process"
Would this be Monotype developers, by any chance?
(No available icon is sufficiently typographically au fait for this story.)
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 10:11 GMT
Isn't that an oxymoron? How many times have you seen people with a "cool ringtone" rushing to get their phone when it starts ringing with last years winning X-factor song?
Good for a laugh though.
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 10:11 GMT
This brings back memories of terminals with downloadable font sets, and email messages with unfiltered escape sequences. Flip your bosses VT100 (yes, I'm that old) into upside-down characters, then tell him it's a known bug, and he'll just have to invert the screen until the service tech arrives.
Will this FlipFont application react to any old SMS messages with the right content in them? Could be fun...
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 10:11 GMT
for the handset manufacturers to not make this customisable by default?
Wasn't bluetooth similarly stymied (briefly) by the operators in an attempt to push up mms sales?
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 10:11 GMT
Words fail me.
I really hope that someone will find the marketing wonk that thought that one up and explain to them the error of their ways. With a cricket bat. Several times.
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 10:11 GMT
The more taxes on the rich and stupid, the better.
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 10:11 GMT
Your phone infected by tacky 'comedy' fonts? No thanks
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 10:14 GMT
They might attract some vicars with 'Font of the week'.
Anyway, http://bancomicsans.com/home.html
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 10:14 GMT
We're going to get people using Impact in Bold or something aren't we?
Sadface because, well, sadface.
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 10:14 GMT
will buy *anything*.
Can't blame the companies, no-ones forcing anyone to buy *anything*
(Remember the fuckwit who blew $4k on the "iJewel" app?)
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 11:36 GMT
Blackberry users have been able to do this for a long time.
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 11:36 GMT
"users have tried to change their phone font and have broken their phone in the process"
I'm with Rueben here,
How do you break your phone trying to change the font?
Were they trying to do it manually with a pen?
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 11:36 GMT
I think this sort of thing should be stopped, it's getting to the point where taking advantage of rich peoeple is becoming a sport, when we shoudl really be treating them like fragile retarded members of society that they really are, iPhones, fonts, Gorden Ramsey reciepes, when will it all stop.
(I don't have a coat, I sprayed it with a can of gold paint from halfords and sold it to a rich twat)
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 12:33 GMT
"We've so little money with our mortgage going up, our fuel bills going up, our food bills rising. I know, instead of buying food for the kids I'll just by a new font for my mobile........"
Jesus wept - hasn't the "credit crunch" made us get real ?
Suggest that anyone from now on that brings out these time and energy wasting ideas should be banned from any work apart from washing Russell Brands underpants.....
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 12:33 GMT
"How do you break your phone trying to change the font?"
Well if it's an unofficial hack on a Nokia handset then you're probably talking about writing over part of the firmware. In flash memory. That's a tremendously stupid thing to do. Trying to get that function working properly is going to cost you a few bricks.
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 12:33 GMT
The best such trick was to change the keyboard layout to something like French or Danish. Drove the little b*st*rds mad.
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 12:33 GMT
Quote: I don't have a coat, I sprayed it with a can of gold paint from halfords and sold it to a rich twat
He only bought it because he didn't get the winning bid for my invisible coat.
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 13:31 GMT
Actually I believe that most of the people buying ringtones etc are the idiots who can least afford it. Not knowing the real value of most of things they spend money on is usually what keeps them poor
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 15:51 GMT
...spend their pocket money on ringtonez and fontz they will get beaten with a stick with nails
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 15:51 GMT
I'm visually impaired and I'd welcome some font flexibility. I don't want to have to pay for it though.
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 15:51 GMT
I think it's a great idea. Now people can have a phone with a Crazy Frog ringtone, wallpaper of amusingly subtitled cat pictures, and their whole UI lovingly rendered in Postcrypt or Revue. It's a perfect indicator of who to avoid like the plague.
The next step, of course, will be to offer translation of all labels/documentation into txtspk, lolcats, and other such languages of the modern world. Then the idiotificationism of mobile phones will finally be complete.
Posted Wednesday 29th October 2008 20:34 GMT
"(Remember the fuckwit who blew $4k on the "iJewel" app?)"
hate to mention it, there was more than one! was it 5? 6?
there was a hack app for the a panasonic flip phone ages ago which could re-skin it, I think that included fonts. riskd stuff though!
with these symbian handsets, it's not the same proposition though, it's a full-blown OS so things are a bit more OS-y. could divert from original flash fonts to new area, or app could intercept?
still shite idea though.
Posted Thursday 30th October 2008 00:01 GMT
I had an n73 a while back, and I recall changing the font one day when I had little else to do- it wasn't tricky and didn't need overwriting the firmware.
ISTR that it was as easy as replacing the font file that was in a hidden folder in the file system. As I recall the tricky bit (which I sidestepped by poaching a font file from somewhere else) was getting a font file in the not-very-common format. There were half a dozen that were knocking about then. I'd imagine that this application would be fairly trivial for someone with a bit of experience writing for the platform.
Have a dig about online and I'm sure you'll find something. I also recall that when I had cause to do a factory reset on the phone sometime later the font changed back to the default less pretty font, but by then I'd got other things to take to bits and tinker with.
Back to the article
