1. "Goowy takes advantage of the new text render engine to make reading your email via a Flash interface even easier."

Are you sure? It just seems to use the default Windows text rendering that exists in Flash already (Cleartype or whatever it's set in Windows settings).

Posted at 5:29PM on Aug 9th 2005 by Guido D.

2. according to the release on the main beta page they are using:
"crisper fonts for improved readability"
and since flash 8 features a new font engine i would assume the crisp fonts are generated via the new version of flash and not via the built in windows fonts. plus the site is full flash so the site developer has control over what font is used or displayed... but i'd say it due to the way flash displays these fonts, not necessarily the fonts themselves

Posted at 5:52PM on Aug 9th 2005 by Mike Schleifstein

3. Of course it's not about the fonts, it's about how fonts are softened/anti-aliased. Flash has a new font rendering engine, but what's seen in Goowy is the standard "device fonts" rendering, which uses Windows' rendering. What's advertised as a new feature for Flash 8 is a new font rendering engine which does similar things as Cleartype does for Windows. However, you can still choose one of several different antialiasing options for your text (among them the old, the new, the standard one, no antialiasing (for pixel fonts), etc.).

And, the site is not full Flash, it shows e-mails in HTML.

Posted at 11:21PM on Aug 9th 2005 by Guido D.

4. opening the beta version of goowy you will find a couple of sample emails from the goowy support, the text of email is loaded inside of a standard flash text box, the emails can also be opened as html only via the show html button if the email is already html formatted. but i could be off in these assumptions given I haven't seen the code behind the site, but even html rendered text in Flash would still be rendered by flash...

Posted at 10:29AM on Aug 10th 2005 by Mike Schleifstein

5. No, e-mail contents are shown below the Flash object in what seems to be an iframe which is displayed by the browser (you can see how you can select the html and images in the email just as any other webpage. It's not a Flash text box.

Anyway, the text that IS rendered by Flash here (the rest of the interface) is NOT rendered using the new text engine. It's rendered through Windows just as if you chose "use device fonts" in any flash movie today with MX 2004. They just don't use the new engine.

Posted at 11:38AM on Aug 10th 2005 by Guido D.

6. Greetings. This is one of the developers of goowy. First and foremost, thanks for the wonderful write up on goowy! To address the font rendering issues, if you are accessing goowy through our Flash 8 website (betasite.goowy.com), then in most places, you will notice a major difference in the quality of fonts displayed compared to the Flash 7 website(www.goowy.com). The Flash 8 version uses the "Anti-Aliasing for Animation" setting to display the fonts in labels, lists, and other data throughout the app. The HTML content in emails is not rendered using Flash 8's text rendering engine. Hope this helps. Thanks!

Posted at 1:53PM on Aug 10th 2005 by Sashi B.