David Emery Online

Google is now telling you the total number of items you’ve read all time. For me, that number stands at 219,652 over these past (nearly) 5 years. I would have thought that would be pretty impressive, but apparently some people are much higher, because the Reader team notes that there’s a 300,000 limit on their tallies.

“From your 967 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 51,399 items. Since February 4, 2010 you have read a total of 300,000+ items.”

I feel this feature may be less useful to me than most.

What would a music experience designed specifically for the modern web look like? This is a question we've been playing around with for the last few months. Browsers and web technologies have advanced so rapidly in the last few years that powerful experiences tailored to each unique person in real-time are now a reality.

File under “mind blowing” and “why didn’t I think of that”.

It reminds me of when Google first released Google Maps, playing around with the draggable maps and wondering how the hell they did it without using Flash. A little light bulb went off in my (and judging by the buzzword-ification of AJAX, a fair few other peoples) head about the possibilities it revealed were possible.

This is just like that.

He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

Assuming this reporting is correct, I think it’s incredible that someone in his position can be so shortsighted; in the future (actually screw that; it’s already happened) people are just going to deal with being Google-able, both from the employer and employee sides. It’s going to be the same for everyone, so it’s not going to be an issue.

Without commenting on the article's argument, I nonetheless found this graph immediately suspect, because it doesn't account for the increase in internet traffic over the same period. The use of proportion of the total as the vertical axis instead of the actual total is a interesting editorial choice.

As you may have read elsewhere, Wired are currently running a ‘The Web Is Dead’ story in a fairly shameless attempt to get traffic (spot the irony). The key basis to their hypothesis is a graph of the split in overall internet traffic between web, video (which apparently includes YouTube, even though that’s a web site…), peer to peer traffic etc. However, as this Boing Boing post so clearly demonstrates, it’s an incredibly misleading graph as it doesn’t account for the fact that internet traffic as a whole has massively increased over the time period they’re graphing.

In other words, Wired are lying with graphics, and it’s pretty shameful and shameless.

What’s a Dimension then? Well, basically what it says right there on the homepage: “Dimensions takes important places, events and things, and overlays them onto a map of where you are.”

More brilliant work from the BERG team.

Morisset has worked with designer Caroline Robert to create a digital artwork that appears when the album is played on mp3 players like the iPod or iPhone. The work deliberately echoes the pleasures of old vinyl record sleeves, where the song lyrics were often written out in full. Each track on the album has an individual image that appears on the iPod screen when it is played, with the lyrics of the song then appearing on the screen as they are sung.

Well this is very clever – you’ve been able to embed time-specific artwork in AAC tracks for ever (and is used a lot in podcasts) but I’ve never seen anyone do anything interesting with it before.

...But actually this is one of the most forward-looking electro-guitar pop albums of the year (by turns it mixes Atari Teenage Riot with MIA, the Mary Chain and industrial hip-hop beats). It seems to constantly push you to the edge of your senses and then reels you back in. It wants to give you a headache and then sooth your brow.

I love the Sleigh Bells album – got to be not only the best debut of the year so far but one of the best albums of 2010 full stop.

I hated the media-creep of iTunes from the start. A dedicated ‘QuickTime Video Library’ would’ve been my preferred solution for Movies and TV shows, a rebuild of iSync to handle MobileMe and iPhone synchronization settings, and a standalone iTunes Store app (or, frankly, web site) for media purchases.

I have a real love/hate relationship with iTunes; I love the fact it has all my music in, and the power of smart playlists and the useful features it’s accumulated over the years, but simultaneously rue the fact it’s undoubtably the worst designed application Apple have.

I think it’s quite interesting that on iOS the functions iTunes does on the Mac are split out into 3 different apps (or 4 on the iPod/iPad with the Movies app) – “iPod” for media playback and organisation, “iTunes” for purchasing media and “App Store” for apps. I’d quite like to see something similar on the desktop, with the Finder handling syncing devices (don’t really need a separate app for that I don’t think).

I wonder what it’s like to be 14, to be watching this unfold and have Wikileaks as the base of certain assumptions you will make about media, news, government and information for the rest of your life.

I am proud to live in a world where this is possible.

WikiLeaks defines the effect the internet has on the world; information cannot be controlled anymore (once more then a small handful possesses it), and you just have to deal with it.

As Anthony says, WikiLeaks is like Napster, but for governments.

As mentioned, Adobe InDesign CS5 software is the central component of the workflow. Using InDesign CS5, design teams create layouts and add interactivity. With layouts in hand, production teams package the assets using the new Digital Content Bundler utility that allows publishers to import vertical and horizontal InDesign CS5 layouts, add metadata, (article title & description, issue number, etc.) and export them into a new “.issue” format.

I’m quite torn on this development from Adobe, which – when it’s finally released – will allow (relatively) easy eMagazine publishing, in the style of the Wired app, from InDesign. On the one hand easy publishing = a good thing, and I love the focus on design that this workflow provides. On the other, surely this stuff should be done in HTML?

Watching Apple’s iPhone 4 FaceTime commercial again, it reminds me of something: Mad Men. The television show is starting its fourth season in a couple of weeks, but the commercial takes me back to the end of season one — an episode called “The Wheel.” I’ve actually talked about this episode before because it contains a scene that is perhaps the best in the entire series. In it, ad man Don Draper gives a presentation to Kodak showing why Sterling Cooper should be handling the account for their new picture projector.

I really like the FaceTime ad for the new iPhone; yes, it borders on (well, cannonballs straight into) over-sentimentality, but it’s an ad that actually makes you feel something and you can’t say that very often.

It feels old school, timeless, in way quite reminiscent to what Pixar achieve with their films.

If you haven’t seen it:

These are exciting times for web developers, with all the browser makers working hard to implement upcoming technologies like HTML5 and CSS3. As a result, it’s time to start revisiting old techniques to see how the same things can be done in smarter, cleaner ways.

An interesting hybrid of techniques I’ve used for the large header images on this site – this latest version uses the CSS3 background-size property to scale it appropriately. Previous versions used javacript to switch different sized images in and out depending on how big the image was, and using media queries to do the same is pretty nifty, however I dropped it for this version as it turned out most people were ending up with the same size image anyway (as the majority of visitors had similar browser window size) and the file size savings weren’t that great.

We have focused on design and navigation, looking to see how we can make all the existing content we produce each day easier for you to find, use and share.

It’s obviously a bit premature to judge a website from static screenshots, but this is looking very nice.

I hope ebooks usher in a world of ideal book lengths. I.e., detached from the burden of having to be "book-sized"; less filler, more focus.

A great idea – after having now spent a bit of time reading on the iPad (2 books so far) I firmly believe this is the future of the medium, and it’s a lot more adaptable then paper ever was.

Of course, whether the publishers will get their heads around this sort of thing is a whole different question…

Over at msnbc.com, where I spend most of my waking hours, we just launched a massive redesign of our story pages. For a news site, the story page is the most atomic and probably most important page of the site. The homepage (“cover” in our vernacular) and section fronts get a lot of attention and push our readers but the story page is where they’re trying to go and it’s where they spend the most time when they get there. This was a massive undertaking, the seeds of which were planted almost two years ago, and spanned the entire company, it’s amazing to finally see it live.

Amazing work – the layout is great, and I particularly like the ‘Upscroll’ navigation which you get to by scrolling up after the page has loaded.

Swedish pop star Robyn has launched a 3D video, complete with Twitter integration, for her delightfully titled new track, Don't Fucking Tell Me What To Do...

Pretty nifty, although it’s not the most amazing bit of computer animation I’ve ever seen.

It is though a good signifier of how the music video really has transitioned to being based primarily on the internet, and how it’s changing because of it.

Improved handling of kerning pairs and ligatures in modern browsers using the text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; declaration.

Nice and simple, although presumably their must be a performance hit of some kind otherwise it would be on by default.

Levi’s Sales Page has individual like buttons for EVERY pair of jeans. I can instantly see what everyone else thinks is cool (sea foam skinny jeans) and what sucks (jorts).

Veeeeery interesting – great user experience.

Firefox will support the CSS calc() value, which lets you compute a length value using an arithmetic expression. This means you can use it to define the sizes of divs, the values of margins, the widths of borders, and so forth.

Oh god, it would be so awesome if all browsers would adopt this – most importantly WebKit, which on the sites I look after has a majority share (!).

I’ve been wanting a fluid layout on this site for about 5 years. I had a brief redesign back in 2005 where I flirted with it for a few months, but it was soon switched back to fixed as I couldn’t get it right.

Lovely stuff – I’ve been a long proponent of fluid width designs, and now with the rise in smaller-screen browsing and media queries now seems the time to really start getting stuck in.

A List Apart – as ever – is leading the charge, this is all you need to know on the subject.