David Emery OnlineThin Text in Safari with Snow Leopard
Safari has a not-so-lovely way of bulking up text using sub-pixel rendering. On previous versions of Safari, this was fixed with a text-shadow declaration, but since Snow Leopard that method no longer works. Fortunately, I’ve found an alternative.
Very useful – my only thought is that I wonder how this affects Safari on pre-SL and on Windows.
Visit ➔Vampire Weekend - Contra
File under “what I did today”. Also, check out what happens when you resize…
Visit ➔Google News: A Payment System and A New Search Bar
Google is developing a micropayment platform that will be “available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year,” according to a document the company submitted to the Newspaper Association of America.
A Google Checkout powered micropayment system could be really quite interesting – not many people have the scale, infrastructure and reach to (finally) make micropayments work, but Google certainly could.
Visit ➔It’s Only Rock and Roll Event Prelude
So my guess is that Cocktail is going to be like a sort of next-generation Dashboard.
I’m thinking (and hoping) the same thing. Not exactly sold on the idea of an iTunes rewrite based on WebKit though – Apple have shown they can write cross platform Cocoa-based apps with Safari, so why wouldn’t they do the same thing with the inevitable Cocoa re-write of iTunes?
Oh, and put me in the ‘Beatles will be on iTunes’ camp – why else would they be doing the event today (Wednesday) as opposed to the more traditional – for Apple -Tuesday?
Visit ➔MySpace Disables Auto-Play
MySpace has made a big change to it’s product – songs no longer auto-play when you visit a MySpace user profile. Autoplays accounted for a billion or more song streams per month, and were costing MySpace a significant amount of money. Turning off that hose is a cost saving maneuver. This also has the benefit, sources say, of improving the user experience and providing labels with better listening data.
Hallelujah.
Visit ➔thehorrors.co.uk
We’ve just launched the new site for The Horrors – we’d been quite happy with the way that the previous video-focused site had gone but it was (finally) time to get something with a bit more content up there.
All textpattern based, as ever, it runs with the ‘activity stream’ format so everything gets fed into the same feed on the home page, whether it’s blog posts, photos from the flickr group, polaroids posted by the band, videos or whatever else. Also watch out for the natural extension of the fading colour trick featured on version 5 of this site, but instead changing the whole background image…
Visit ➔iLike launches iPhone apps for Jeff Buckley, The Cribs, Sonic Youth…
Back in May, music service iLike announced plans for a new B2B service that would create and launch iPhone applications for artists. More than 250 of them have gone live on the App Store in the last few days.
And they’re all rubbish. I really don’t see the point in such generic, assembly line production of mediocre apps – is anyone going to care? Wow, you can download an app to listen to 30s clips of an album (err, like you can in the iTunes app), see twitter updates from the band and see upcoming tour dates (insert ticket affiliate link here).
Doubly stupid considering the only way to get decent volume on the iTunes store is to get some promotion backing it up, either on the store/top 10 charts os somewhere else – how exactly are you going to promote an app when there are 249 near identical other versions?
I’m wondering whether it’s already too late to bother with music related iPhone app development – there’s just too much noise and rubbish to get lost in.
Visit ➔Hands-On with the Spotify iPhone App
We’ve been testing Spotify’s iPhone app since last week for this U.S. exclusive. Based on that, our prediction that it could generate big profits for Spotify — and for an ailing music industry — appears to be on the money. This slick app grants instant access to over six million on-demand tracks and your customized Spotify playlists, and it sounds great even on planes, subways, and other places where you can’t get a decent cell signal thanks to an offline playback feature.
Nothing unexpected here, but it looks like it works and works well, although the offline caching stuff looks a little over complicated. Also, I still don’t believe that they haven’t added a way of browsing the catalogue yet – you can still only search, and I can never think of the right thing to search for…
Update: There’s a video of it in action up now as well:
Visit ➔