David Emery Online

Friday Links XXX

15 September 2007

London Transport Museum: Poster collection
Very nice set of over 5000 posters – worth having a good look at if you’re needing some inspiration.

Erik Davis on watermarked promotional CDs
It always amazes me how blazé journalists have got about receiving promotional CDs – a lot of them seem to see it as a right, not a privilege. In fact, many seem to view them as a supplemental form of income. The easy solution is – of course – to stop sending them CDs in advance; just let them have it when everyone else does (and do that – digitally at least – as soon as the record is finished).

Weekend Feature: The How of Habbo Hotel
While I can’t help but feel Habbo Hotel is slowly fading away, they’re still a very relevant site and have occasionally been radically innovative.

Adobe gives peek at online Photoshop
It’s fairly obvious that it shares nothing with the “real” Photoshop other then the name, but it’s still interesting never the less.

Coda Toolbar and the Three Pixel Conundrum
It’s these details that really matter, if you ask me, across all sorts of medium.

Fix the Leopard Folders
You know what? I actually quite like the new Leopard folders. However, they’re certainly less usable then before – the addition of colour would be good.

Seth Godin: Big ideas
“Ideas are easy, doing stuff is hard” – there are no truer words.

Universal Apparently Contemplating Blanket Music Licenses for ISPs
I’m fascinated in this new direction the industry could be going in – think of the ramifications of music legally being free…

Five Reasons Could MP3 Blogs Be the Next Record Labels
Another slant on the “music filter” idea.

Google May Add Comment Feature On Shared Reader Feeds
I don’t get why TechCrunch are so opposed to this – how is it different from Digg et al?

Apple UK to host special (iPhone?) event next week
Fingers crossed… although I still would rather not be on O2. It’ll be interesting to see if it’s the same model that the US uses, although I’m not too fussed about 3G – EDGE isn’t actually that slow. Another interesting point is that phones on O2 are traditionally unlocked…

McLaren hit by constructors’ ban
This whole affair strikes me as being very, very odd.

Bloglines Beta 1.0.2 – Listening to Blogliners; Edit Feeds and Folder for Beta
Coming soon: “New preferences allowing you to select different read/unread modes (Classic or Beta)” – yay!

HMV lets digital terrier off the leash
HMV only have a future if they stop depending on CD, DVD and Games sales – they seem to have realised this, but it may still be too late.

The Ringtones Racket
This whole thing seems very un-Apple – I wonder if this was used as a bargaining chip with some of the major labels?

MySpace Getting A Little Less Chaotic?
The sleeping giant finally wakes; go on – update the disaster that is the profile page layout while you’re at it!

Google backs private Moon landing
Thank god private enterprise has stepped in where government space initiatives have failed (I’m looking at you, NASA).

Prince seeks to ‘reclaim the net’
Seriously – what an asshole.

Exclusive Preview: Ambrosia Software’s WireTap Studio
While I’m sure the functionality is good, the UI is all over the place: the floating controller looks like an OS 9 program, and what’s going on with the little rivet holes in the main window?

MTV Flux Social Network Launches Tonight
Because the world really needs another social network.

Yahoo Mash: Yahoo Tries to Be Facebook
Because the world really needs another social network.

The Continuing History of Amazon’s Tab Navigation
I’m liking the look of the new amazon.com – tabs as a UI metaphor just don’t scale well.

Logic Pro 8
With little fanfare, Apple have sneaked out a new version of Logic with a brilliant new interface and slashed the price. Particularly worth seeing is this video of the interface of MainStage – it just looks stunning.

Gapingvoid licensing terms
I like the term “Indirect marketing” – makes a lot of sense to me.

kidharpoon.com
This is a new site we’ve just launched for Kid Harpoon – what’s interesting is that you can’t get in without a code that’ll be given out on a wristband at his gigs. It’ll be fun to see what happens…

Jack Peñate: Second, Minute Or Hour
The animation took a significant amount of my morning…

Meredith Davis: The Cult of ASAP
I really don’t believe in the “tight deadlines, stay working till 23:00” philosophy – if companies really wanted you to do that they’d pay overtime (which they never seem to do).