David Emery Online

Lots of fun as ever:

Not being the types to rest on our laurels, we’ve just launched probably the most complicated site we’ve done all year – a new site for Rough Trade Records:

www.roughtraderecords.com

When we started working with Rough Trade their site was in a pretty sorry state; it was all frame based, with no CMS underpinning it so updates took far to much work – it was in dire need of a complete overhaul. One of the side effects of having such an old site was that their wasn’t really anything for us to work from – no coherent ‘look’ or branding short of the iconic logo, so it was clean-sheet-of-paper time.

We quickly focused in on the key things that are important about Rough Trade – records and artists. It sounds pretty obvious, but with some labels you find focus elsewhere – the label often has a brand and look of its own that transcends the individual artist or record, but this isn’t the case here. To represent the records properly, and to provide some kind of aesthetic bedrock, we decide to use the artwork as large as we could get away with – hence the jQuery based carousel at the top of the page.

To represent artists we had a go at doing something I’ve been itching to do for ages – individually art-worked pages. Each different artist has their own ‘look’ and imagery, and we felt that trying to squeeze that into a generic layout just wouldn’t work for Rough Trade. Hence, each one looks different – check out Antony’s page, Jarvis’ page or Miracle Fortress’ page for a demonstration of what I mean.

Other things I’d like to highlight include the Live dates page, which features a full page background Google Map, and the audio player which features streaming and downloadable MP3s which you can then embed on your site if you want:

Technically this is – as ever – all based on Textpattern, quite admittedly pushing it to the limit and utilising several plugins (including some hand-written ones) as well as a CakePHP-based admin system for looking after Artists (they’re just a little too custom to fit into Textpattern’s normal article-based content). Otherwise I guess it’s all fairly straight forward…

Last week it was the annual Digital Music Awards; it’s probably a mark of how busy things have been recently that I haven’t written about it sooner…

The awards themselves are a rather awkward collision between an industry pats-on-backs type affair and a glitzy, Brit-awards style mainstream show. So, the latter half brings us a red carpet outside the Roundhouse, the Sugababes, Iglu and Hartly and a show on ITV2, and the former nets us awards like ‘Best Artist Promotion’ and ‘Best Mobile Campaign’ with everything being collected by the people behind the work, not the bands themselves (with the exception of Hadouken, who actually bothered to turn up).

As Jonas from Last.fm says this leads to a pretty odd atmosphere; the tackiness that you often encounter in certain sections of the industry without much of the redemption that comes in the form of ‘decent’ music (with the obvious exception of British Sea Power, who – as always – rocked). It’s a shame really that the pretence of glamour has to be there – most of the awards have a diverse bunch of entrants that deserve recognition; with the world of digital music moving and changing so quickly it’s good to highlight the most interesting experiments. It’s a shame that the Sugababes have to be there to do that.

We were up for 5 awards this year, and managed to take home 2 which is nice – one for Best Breakthrough Artist for Vampire Weekend and one for Best Artist for Radiohead:

Sadly they spared the TV audience my slightly rambled and apparently in-audable acceptance speech for Vampire Weekend – such a shame…

In what may well stand as a defining moment in the maturation of Apple’s App Store, Tapulous has announced that it has partnered with the band Nine Inch Nails to release a premium version of its popular game Tap Tap Revenge some time in October.

I find it quite interesting that this NIN version of Tap Tap Revenge will be a premium version, considering that the normal version is free (and has been very successful).

I’ve been thinking a lot about the pricing models of music related iPhone apps recently – it’s the traditional ‘free, but with promotional value’ versus ‘monetized, but with less promotional value’ debate that music videos also have to face. My general conclusion is that the ‘free with promo’ option is probably the best to go for – if the game you are in is selling music then the surrounding content you generate that isn’t part of the body of work (like you could argue a music video is) should be seen as promotional value only, there to increase music sales.

That being said, if the content you create is compelling enough in its own right then it seems reasonable to think about charging for it, but then is that worth the development time and resources? This NIN/Tapulous deal seems like a nice bridge between the two, although I think it would have made far more sense to have the NIN version free – with the value being in increased music sales – and the normal version for-pay.

To explain it would be to ruin it, but this is a masterful piece of online advertising for the new Wii Wario game (which sadly I’ve heard isn’t that good).

Most of the time, these products are poorly built, poorly customizeable and then want to charge artists money (for these amazing services). Bandcamp seems simple, easy to use and free, though they do have some plans to make money.

It’s amazing how many of these type of products there are out there, and still not one I’d choose to use. Bandcamp seems better then most, but only does the ‘music’ bit (playing/downloading/purchasing) for the time being and in all honesty ecommerce from a small band’s site generally isn’t worth the time and effort (not enough sales and you have to do all the promotion yourself).

Do you listen to albums any more?

For me, the answer is (almost, and I’ll come to that later) no.

In fact, are albums really all that relevant any more?

Now don’t get me wrong, I am very much not trying to push for the single track mentality that we were all supposed to gravitate to thanks to digital music. No, I think getting an artists’ output in roughly 10-15 track chucks works and makes sense; you can’t get a true sense for what an artist is trying to achieve with much less then that.

Singles can so easily be just a one-off, flash in the pan moment of brilliance or conversely an oddity that doesn’t represent the full body of work justly. EPs on the hand can give you much more of the full picture, but still leave you wanting so much more (for example, the 5 track sampler for ‘Twenty One’ by Mystery Jets was by no means representative of the best bits of the full album).

Albums as a collection of tracks, then, is still relevant. However, does the concept of an album make sense?

It’s all about the ubiquitous ‘shuffle’ of course. When iPods and the iTunes Store first came along I remember much talk about the ‘death of the album’ as people could now mix their music collections together into shuffled-up playlists and cherry-pick the tracks they like instead of buying the whole thing, filler and all. 5 years on and this only seems to be half right – people shuffle and concoct playlists, but the death of the album just hasn’t happened. Single tracks sell like singles have always sold – give or take – and album sales (for album artists) have remained steady.

However, digital consumption of music I think is definitely making a difference. Looking around on Last.fm and looking at people’s listening habits you can see a huge amount of ‘shuffle’ – each track being a different artist and a different album. And I think this is not only because of how people are listening but also because of the albums are being released at the moment.

When was the last time you listened to an album that was obviously designed as an album, rather then a series of tracks? Certainly I can’t remember one where sequence really matters being released recently – while that’s not to say they’re not out there (as I’m sure they are) it just doesn’t seem to be that relevant these days.

As a point of reference, right now I’m mostly listening to a shuffled playlist of the new Metallica (ok, not great), Fujiya & Miyagi (promising) and the new TV On The Radio. A pretty diverse bunch, but it works – none of these albums need you to listen to them in one go, none suffer for being part of a playlist.

However – and as referenced at the start – the TV On The Radio album (‘Dear Science,’ comma and all) is something different, something special. It’s only the second album this year that I’ve been motivated to break out of the clutter of a playlist (the other being Portishead) and listen on its own. It’s a superb piece of work, and holds together as a whole extremely well.

I still listen to it on shuffle, though.

As a parting gift, here’s the track ‘DLZ’ from the album – possibly a career highlight:

DLZ.mp3 (5.3MB MP3)

CrossOver Chromium is a Mac and Linux port of the open source Chromium web browser. CrossOver Chromium is available for download from CodeWeavers, free of charge.

Seems to work surprisingly well – good enough at least to do a double check that everything that works ok in Safari works in Chrome.

I will never write another iPhone application for the App Store as currently constituted.

Writing software is a serious investment of time and energy. It also carries the opportunity cost of the other things you could have built. We live in a capitalist economy. Under capitalism, profit is the reward for economic risk. Without a reasonable expectation of profit, the sensible business-person will not invest. Without investment and risk-taking, there is no innovation.

Apple’s current practice of rejecting certain applications at the final hurdle – submission to the App Store – is disastrous for investor confidence. Developers are investing time and resources in the App Store marketplace and, if developers aren’t confident, they won’t invest in it. If developers – and serious developers at that – don’t invest, what’s the point?

I’m very concerned with the policy Apple is adopting with the approval process on the App Store – sure, the ‘I Am Rich’ fiasco made sense (it surely was causing problems with some users accidently buying it) but arbitrarily banning apps destroys developer confidence.

On the plus side, the backlash has been so widespread that I can’t help but think they’ll change their policies – they pretty much have to at this point.

Back in February I talked about MobileScrobbler, the rather brilliant iPhone app that allowed you to scrobble to Last.fm directly from your iPhone.

Since February however a lot of things have happened in the iPhone ecosystem; most importantly the release of the 3G iPhone with the simultaneous release of iPhone OS version 2.0. With v2.0 we got the official App Store, which you would think was the natural home for the MobileScrobbler app but alas, no – MobileScrobbler has to run (obviously, if you think about it) as a background app to pay attention to what songs you are playing, and that’s not allowed with official apps. Also, I don’t think the forthcoming v2.1 update which includes push notifications for apps will help either (that’ll work great for things like IM apps, but not for things that need to monitor other apps on your phone).

To rub salt into the wound, MobileScrobbler has actually been turned into an official Last.fm app on the app store – removing the scrobbling and focusing on Last.fm radio playback (which I have no interest in), which means that all development on MobileScrobbler has stopped. And development is needed – unofficial apps made for iPhone OS v1 need remaking for v2.

Luckily enough (for all two of you that are still reading by this point) someone has taken the scrobbling code from MobileScrobbler and farmed it off into it’s own app called – and this must have taken some time to think of – ‘Scrobble’. You can get more info about it in the Last.fm iPhone group.

To get unofficial apps onto your v2 iPhone you have to go through a process called ‘Jailbreaking’, which is all a little bit hackish but relatively straightforward. First, you need to download an app called QuickPwn from here and then go through the install steps – it’s easy enough to do, although you do have to hold down various combinations of buttons on your phone for specific amounts of time at one point, which was all a little 80’s sci-fi…

Once you’ve gone through that process you’ll find 2 new apps on your phone – Cydia and Installer. Anyone that has previously jailbroken their phone will instantly gravitate to the Installer app (as that’s what was used on v1) but don’t bother – there’s nothing of note in there to install. Cydia is where the apps are, although their aren’t nearly as many as their used to be thanks to the app store. You can find the Scrobble app under ‘Multimedia’ in Cydia – install it, enter in your Last.fm username/password (hmmm – they could do with supporting OAuth) and you should be scrobbling away!

The executive summary is that Cappuccino is re-implementation of many of the basic parts of Cocoa, and Objective-J is a language which looks nearly identical to Objective-C and “compiles down” into JavaScript. You can also use JavaScript right inline with Objective-J, similar to how you can use C in Objective-C.

This looks very impressive, and can certainly make interesting looking apps but I’m really not comfortable working so abstracted away from the real code. Coding javascript, html and css well in a cross-browser way is hard and I’m not convinced that 280 North will have solved every problem and bug inherent in the medium.

What do you if your code is right but it doesn’t work? You’re so far away from the actual code you’ve got no chance.

I’m also still not convinced by web sites pretending to be desktop applications – they’re not, and the most successful ones (like Flickr and Gmail) don’t pretend to be.

The official pricing for the unsubsidized phones is now much higher than for the devices on contract and will require £350 ($631) for an 8GB iPhone 3G and £400 ($721) for the 16GB version.

They’re going to sell shed-loads of these over Christmas at this price – for comparison the 8GB Nokia N95 currently sells for £449.95 on O2 Pay-As-You-Go.

Very impressive that you get a year’s free data as well…

Google Chrome is Google’s open source browser project. As rumored before under the name of “Google Browser”, this will be based on the existing rendering engine Webkit. Furthermore, it will include Google’s Gears project.

I don’t see anything here that excites me in any way – I have no faith that Google can design a better application UI then Apple can (in Safari), and I don’t see what new features this brings to the table. Also, I hope no one with a Mac gets too interested in this – Google have yet to ship a Mac app with a decent interface.

However, anything that broadens the usage of WebKit has got to be a good thing – I dream for the day when most people are using it…

This looks so much better then pretty much any other blog engine interface I’ve seen – I still need to be convinced that it’ll have both the simplicity and flexibility Textpattern allows though.

Very nifty javascript parallax effect – I can’t wait to use this on something…