David Emery Online

Dynamic Design

Google’s Music Onebox Launches, Powered By MySpace And Lala

Onebox will let users stream songs directly from Google’s search result page, and will also include additional content like tour information and music videos […] The new feature is being powered by two entirely different services: Lala, the innovative music site that lets people buy ‘web songs’ for ten cents, and iLike, the popular streaming music and artist hub that was recently acquired by MySpace.

Dear Google,

Hope all is well at Google Towers – I’m sure the revenue share you’re getting from iLike & MySpace must be a nice extra bonus on top of all your adsense cash.

I was wondering though; any chance of making it so we could populate the ‘Onebox’ content ourselves, based on putting content on musicians websites? Maybe even – and stop me if I’m talking like a crazy person – we could put it in the html (maybe in a specific format to make it easier) and you could somehow read that html, on a regular basis, and use that to populate your search results pages?

Just a thought – maybe that’s too difficult for you guys to figure out.

Anyway, keep on with the good work,

- David

After the Deadline – Open Sourced!

After the Deadline, an intelligent checker for spelling and grammar, is now free software. The server software is available under the GNU General Public License.

Very nice work from the people that make Wordpress – particularly interesting is their jQuery API which makes it very simple to add a spell & grammar check to a textarea.

The New Grooveshark: Faster, Prettier And Still Phenomenal

I’ve always considered the Grooveshark web app’s UI to be quite amazing, so I was wary when I was granted preview access to the service’s new look, which the startup is presenting publicly for the first time today (at 12 AM EST). Fortunately, they somehow managed to make it even more awesome than it already was, and the makeover was more than a new lick of paint as it also included a number of performance tweaks to make it run smoother.

You know what? The new version of Grooveshark is pretty slick; it looks very nice. However, while I was sitting through the (inevitable) loading screen and spinning beachball cursor that a flash-based app brings I was wondering: are there any popular all flash sites? Sure, you get plenty of places who use it as the way of delivering content (YouTube, MySpace etc etc) but I can’t think of any that are solely flash-based. Not one…

VW launches Real Racing GTI on iPhone

[…] Volkswagen got smart and instead partnered with developer Firemint, which already has a well received racing game for sale in the App Store called Real Racing. Together, the two companies have put out Real Racing GTI, a free version of the $6.99 app that exclusively features the new 2010 Volkswagen GTI.

Very nice free iPhone game there from VW, and a smart way of spending those marketing dollars…

iTunesLP.net

At this moment these iTunes LPs are available for a select list of new releases on the iTunes store. However we think it would be nice to have many older, out-of-print, obscure albums or albums on indie-labels to get the same experience; and with that in mind we started working on finding out exactly how this new format works, in order to share our results with the community.

I thought about doing this, but low and behold someone has beaten me to it (and done a much better job, of course). Thanks internet! The iTunes LP format is quite intriguing really – we’ve now got a extremely modern web renderer built into the most popular music software, and they can interact together nicely (using a dab of Javascript) – there’s got to be some interesting things you can do with that…

Firefox Implements Webkit's CSS Transitions

The Webkit team has proposed a CSS extension for transitions between property values. It would be nice to implement this in Mozilla as well.

This is great; sometime in the near future – hopefully this will be in Firefox 3.6 – we’ll have CSS-based animated transitions in 3 major browsers (Safari, Chrome and Firefox). That’ll remove 90% of my jQuery usage in one fell swoop…

Fun with Quartz Composer in Snow Leopard and the BBC Radio Schedule

I think the easiest way to understand it, is it lets you plug things into other things to produce very cool things, without the need to write a single line of code. […] With this new functionality as well as other new patches, I have created a composition that rolls through the BBC’s National Radio networks and displays who is currently on air, as well as downloading and displaying the network logo and a pretty image for that show.

Very nifty – I had totally forgotten about Quartz Composer and its powerful simplicity in making very pretty data mashups.

Spotify Goes Offline

Beginning later today, Spotify Premium subscribers will be able to select their playlists and set them to be ‘Available offline’. Those playlists will then be synced to the computer so you can listen to your favorite tunes even if your internet connection goes down or if you’re at summer house with no connection at all.

I don’t think adding an offline mode to the Spotify desktop app is that interesting really (when these days don’t you have a internet connection on your computer?), but what is interesting about this story is it highlights Spotify’s update model. Unlike most desktop apps, Spotify gets updates just like a web app – every now and then when you launch it you’ll notice new features pop up.

Spotify is probably the first true hybrid web/desktop application.

Introducing Google Chrome Frame

Recent JavaScript performance improvements and the emergence of HTML5 have enabled web applications to do things that could previously only be done by desktop software. One challenge developers face in using these new technologies is that they are not yet supported by Internet Explorer. Developers can’t afford to ignore IE — most people use some version of IE — so they end up spending lots of time implementing work-arounds or limiting the functionality of their apps.

With Google Chrome Frame, developers can now take advantage of the latest open web technologies, even in Internet Explorer. From a faster Javascript engine, to support for current web technologies like HTML5’s offline capabilities and <canvas>, to modern CSS/Layout handling, Google Chrome Frame enables these features within IE with no additional coding or testing for different browser versions.

I’m really torn on how I feel about this; on the one hand, more people using WebKit is undoubtedly a good thing. On the other, embedding a browser inside another browser just feels plain wrong on a bunch of levels (what about things like memory usage, for example?) and seems like a pretty extreme way of enabling better HTML5/CCS3/JS support in IE.

Also, does it really help that much? I can’t help but think that if someone is persuaded enough to download plugin (and hence has the Administer rights to do so) then it would be better to persuade them to download a different browser instead…