Die »dritte Hand« war so nicht geplant: Petr van Blokland loggte sich als Zuschauer in die Präsentation ein (Foto: hdschellnack.de)

Erik van Blokland und Just van Rossum nennen sich seit 15 Jahren Letterror. Die beiden sind Font-Hacker. Schon ihre erste Schrift FF Beowolf machte Schlagzeilen, weil sich die Konturen ihrer Buchstaben unentwegt nach dem Zufallsprinzip veränderten. Weil sie nur Holländische, PostScript, Python und HTML fließend sprechen, erschloss sich der Clou ihres TYPO-Vortrags nur wenigen Zuschauern. Manche glaubten, Just und Erik hätten eine Flash-Spielerei vorgeführ, dabei können sie Flash nicht ausstehen. Ich habe sie mal gebeten, den technischen Hintergrund ihrer Präsentation aufzuschreiben. Hier ist ihre Zusammenfassung in Englisch:
»The system was a python application, running on Mac OS X. The stage is drawn on Erik van Blokland’s machine, connected to the projector. Erik shows up as a righthanded cursor. Just logs in over wireless ethernet, he shows up as a lefthanded cursor. We had given the remote app to two more. All events from the remotes, sound, keystrokes, mouse moves, scrolling, clicking and even motion detection on the newer powerbooks are sent to the stage machine. Everyone can interact with all objects, create new text, scale, drag, bounce, zoom.
The Noordzij ›e‹ objects interpolate between 8 shapes, the parameters respond to various ways of scrolling. Text can be created by clicking on the ›desktop‹ and typing. Font switches change groups of animated fonts, scrolling controls the font size. Some text objects respond to proximity of a user: getting closer makes Advert Rough go fatter. Kosmik does its flipper thing. The Twin typeface responds to scrolling by showing formal/round/weird transformations. The soccerball responds to sound – yelling makes it go one way, shaking makes it go another. TypoMan and Krokodil are straight from Poppekast, though only the shapes survived from the old project.
Building the engine, the remotes and the objects was fun. It gave us a chance to work with some awesome tech, obviously Python but specifically PyObjC which offers direct access to OSX’s Cocoa and very fast graphics. The remote event networking stuff was very cool, at least to us building it and using it. I assume it’s old news to gamers, but we rolled our own. Play, you know. And absolutely no Flash anywhere.«
Erik van Blokland: »We had tested the remotes briefly, Just logging in from Haarlem, but most of Saturday had to be spent chasing bugs. By the time we had to go on stage we were almost sure it would work. I was nervous, I don’t think Just was. Petr van Blokland and Paul van der Laan had remote apps and were going to log in at the end and help make a visual mess. Petr however logged in straightaway, which I suppose is true to the theme of the conference, it was also unexpected and very distracting. I will forgive him for that, eventually.«

Erik van Bloklands Bruder Petr saß im Publikum und loggte sich gleich zu Beginn in die Präsentation von Letterror ein. Dies sorgte für Nervosität auf der Bühne, weil so nicht abgemacht: es sollte ein Gag am Ende der Show werden. Erik: »Ich werde ihm das vielleicht verzeihen.« (Foto: kassnerfoto.de)

Just und Erik: »We should have explained more about what we were doing to the audience. More time to play with the system (rather than just building it) would have been good as well as it might have given us more confidence in using it, but that’s how it went. We are glad TYPO offered us an occasion to build something, and we appreciate the patience shown by the audience.«

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