David Emery OnlineFriday Links XXXI
22 September 2007
6th Gen iPods won’t work with Linux, Winamp
The whole iTunes – iPod connection is very important to Apple, so this doesn’t surprise me. Although – could this just be a way of trying to verify that the data is correct, as opposed to anything more sinister?
GIMP UI brainstorm
It never ceases to amaze me how bad open source UIs are – are there no UI designers that do open source work?
Sweating the Small Stuff
Jottit is a nice piece of work – so beautifully simple. Simple doesn’t mean easy to make, though…
SpiralFrog Finally Launches Free Music Download Store
I’m impressed they’ve finally managed to launch, but still utterly unimpressed by the actual service.
Color Photos with the Game Boy Camera
Awesome stuff!
activeCollab 1.0: Plans and Prices
We use an extensively customised version of activeCollab at work – it’s basically a rip-off of BaseCamp that you can install on your own servers. The move to a paid model (it used to be open source) is pretty short sighted, if you ask me – especially at these prices which are outrageous.
Pricing details, updated
Better, but still not worth it – if I’m paying, I’d rather pay for BaseCamp thanks very much. I’m very tempted to start a fork of the last version, with the improvements we’ve made… watch this space.
jQuery UI
While the world doesn’t really need any more javascript libraries, this one looks very nice for quickly adding a rich UI.
Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site
”...our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising” – it’s all about the advertising from here on out.
Two kinds of ‘don’t know’
Yes, I pretty much link to every post Seth writes, but that’s because they’re all so good.
Our feature presentation
The new Google speadsheet app is very simple, not allowing for a huge amount of customisation, but that’s probably a very good thing – who really needs all those silly transitions PowerPoint has? Microsoft must be very worried…
New Music Strategies: Manifesto
Well worth a read – pretty much spot on all the way through.
CSS Support for Feeds
I’m unsure whether this is good thing or not – sure it makes sense for things like floating images, but what happens if someone sets the text colour to white (because they have a dark background on their site, for example)? It has to be used very carefully, as you have no idea of the environment your content will appear in.
iTunes to Be Exclusive Distributor of Ed Burns’s New Movie
A very interesting move; there’s going to be a lot of people watching to see how this turns out.
Strategy Letter VI
The idea of a meta-language that compiles down to JavaScript sounds very scary to me. I agree though that at some point one JS UI library is going to become dominant, and that will most definitely be a good thing. At the moment, my bet would be YUI.
Ustream’s Live Drama Webisode: If the “Real World” Were Contrived…
An interesting new format for more traditional broadcast drama.
Mint
Looks very interesting, and pretty much solves what I talked about here. Sadly US only, though, and will probably remain that way considering we already have a fairly large credit card company called Mint. Did they not check the name first?
PNG8 – The Clear Winner
Very interesting – didn’t know about this!
It’s A Mac World
The influencers all use Macs – how are you going to influence anyone if your product is PC only? Look at the Zune, for gods sake…
NBC to Offer Free Downloads of Popular Shows
I’ve heard elsewhere that this is PC only. See my point above – well done guys.
Startup idea: Make My Music Legal
Surely iTunes should offer this, maybe at a 50% discount per song converted. I’d do it…
iPhone & iPod: contain or disengage?
Apple in trying to make money shock! People always seem to forget that they are a business, not a charity or a religion.
New Type Of Record Label Handles Touring, Publishing, Merchandise
This isn’t revolutionary – I think most labels are probably doing it. But it is interesting that most labels are probably doing it…
Brilliant: FIQL Avoids Copyright Trap Through Music Videos
I may have said it before, but video is the natural form for playing music on the web.
Drawing Olinda
Beautiful stuff.
Principles and Guidelines for the Modern Photowalker
I carry my camera everywhere, but I really need to get in the habit of taking more photos.
Device and Desires
Yay! Stephen Fry has a blog! And – unsurprisingly enough – it’s pretty darn good.