Every icon has been redesigned from the ground up to be pixel perfect at Bootstrap's default 14px. We've partnered with icnfnt.com to allow sub-setting of the font to get just the icons you use on your site, keeping load times way down. And there's a more open license (SIL Open Font License). And there's new styles with spinners.
Wow. Am I the only one who doesn't like the pixel-perfect alignment?
I hate to rain on the parade, but the v2 icons were beautiful -- all perfectly proportioned. Absolutely fantastic. The new ones have to distort things to align to the grid, and wind up looking inconsistent and unbalanced.
I'm comparing the new icons with my downloaded version of 2.0, and, for example, the "i" in the "info" icon is no longer centered. Or, now icons like "asterisk" or "ban-circle" have strokes that are too thick, while "envelope" is too skinny -- since strokes basically have to be 1px or 2px, I guess.
Previously, the icons were drawn in a balanced and consistent way, and all looked good together. Now, their widths and shapes have been shoehorned into a 14px grid that frankly destroys a lot of their charm and consistency.
Pixel-fitting made perfect sense when fonts weren't anti-aliased, but now that almost everyone has even subpixel hinting enabled, it's anachronistic. The FontAwesome team has done a great job with introducing new icons, but it saddens me to see what were once beautifully proportioned icons that showed excellent design taste, now take a giant step backwards.
In a strange way, it reminds me of when IKEA stopped using Futura and started using Verdana a couple years ago. Excellent design being replaced by mediocre design which is more "technologically accessible"...
It's the old "fuzzy approximation of real shape vs sharp representation of a shape altered to look sharp at low pixel density" argument all over again, which last flared up when Apple released Safari for Windows.
If you assume the other side is simply "doing it wrong" then conversation rapidly goes downhill, it's an engineering trade-off.
I personally like the fuzzy side of things, and I thought that they'd added hinting (possibly via ttfautohint) to make them sharp at small sizes on platforms than need hints (i.e. Windows basically). But, possibly to make it easier for people to contribute, they've conformed the icons to a grid at all sizes, and for all platforms, instead.
It's possible this was done to appease the Bootstrap devs, who were very picky about small scale rendering being pixel perfect and gave that as a reason for sticking with glyphicon hand drawn pngs. But its seems those same devs have chosen to go with fuzzy vectors glyphicons for Bootstrap 3.
I'll probably go with using those, which is a shame as I like the open contribution model and new license of Font-Awesome better. (Talking of which, how can it be openly licensed via SIL, but still allow glyph contributers to keep CC-BY-SA?)
I've even seen Android devs using these icon fonts now. It's actually one of the easiest way to do vector icons, and they can be colored dynamically using a Shader class.
Yet another great example of the problem with Twitter and not having any policy/business-plan for dealing with squatter accounts.
They should, if account is unusued for 3 months, send an email saying "are you still using this" and just ask the person to login to verify they are. If that email (and multiple subsequent) aren't answered within 3 months, the person initiating the "claim unusued handle" request gets the handle.
Yeah, that's one of the things I'm updating. Getting animations to appear the same in every browser is a pretty deep rabbit hole, and full of changing one breaks another.
