David Emery OnlineThe New Jack Penate Website
At work we’ve just launched the new site for Jack Peñate, which features all kinds of jParallax-based crazy scrolling flowers.
Really happy with the way this one turned out…
Visit ➔SoundCloud’s Terms and Conditions - Are they fair and reasonable ?
Have you read SoundCloud’s Terms and Conditions ? Did you know that by signing up, you grant them (and their successors) the right to do almost anything they like with your music? For free? Forever?
The article goes on to say how they’re sure that SoundCloud aren’t going to do anything nasty with their your content, and I agree but that really misses the point; what happens – and this isn’t too far fetched – if SoundCloud gets bought up by someone who has lesser morals? The T&Cs are quite clear – they could do almost anything they like with your content.
This isn’t a problem unique to SoundCloud either – web darlings Vimeo and ustream.tv both have similar conditions in their T&Cs. This is the really boring side of working on the edge of developing technologies, but in the long run do you really want some little web startup owning your content?
Visit ➔Introducing Typekit
That’s where Typekit comes in. We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.
This sounds great in theory. They are promising magic however, so I will believe it when I see it. Also, it looks like they might be relying on @font-face which really doesn’t have enough browser support at this time. Hopefully they’ve solved all these problem, though…
Visit ➔Palm Pre syncs with iTunes on a Mac just like an iPhone
“Plug a Pre into a Mac and it syncs, seamlessly, with Apple’s iTunes,” the financial publication reports. “In fact, the iTunes Store treats the Pre just as it would an iPod or an iPhone with one exception: it can’t handle old copy-protected songs.”
This is smart. Very smart. The Pre is the first credible contender to the iPhone, but the first thing that went through my head was ‘what about my music?’. Don’t forget that half of the success of the iPod is down to iTunes and the ease of use when it comes to device management it brings with it. I would assume though that if the Pre turns out to be a serious threat – personally I think there’s room for the both of them – Apple will make it start not working.
Visit ➔Spotify Music App for Android
If I were Steve Jobs, the video to the right would scare me senseless. It shows a Google Android phone running a Spotify app that appears to succeed in porting the full Spotify experience — still not available to most Americans – to a mobile phone.
On the contrary – I think the reason that we’ve seen this running on an Android based phone is that the iPhone app is embargoed until the WWDC keynote in a week and a half’s time, where it’ll get some stage time. Don’t forget that Apple has been featuring the Last.fm app – which has similar streaming music capabilities – on its TV adverts. A Spotify app is a great addition to the app store.
Visit ➔Looking for a Web Developer
We are looking for a talented and enthusiastic developer to join our in-house web development team, to develop and build upon our suite of online internal business systems and to code and build artists and label web sites. The role will work alongside our web developers specialising in the back-end technical development of wide and interesting range of sites and tools.
Required skills:
• Strong PHP
• Strong MySQL
• Semantic HTML
• Javascript
• CSS
We are hiring again at work, so if you’re a web dev in London and would like to work with bands like Radiohead, Jarvis, Sonic Youth, Bon Iver and many many more get in touch.
Visit ➔Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS
When I asked myself why people visit my sites, and the ones that I make for other people, the answer was always “for the content”. Content that is almost always written words and that means type.
That is why I’m now advocating to my clients (and to you), that where feasible, not to waste hours in time and a client’s money on lengthy workarounds in an unnecessary attempt at cross-browser perfection. Instead, you and I should provide simple but effectively designed HTML elements. This means just great typography for headings, paragraphs, quotations, lists, tables and forms and no styling of layout.
A great idea, I think – come up with one stylesheet just for IE6 that completely ignores layout, backgrounds etc and focuses on making the page content look nice (albeit simple). We’ve stopped supporting IE6 on the sites we make now as the user % has dropped below 5% (finally!) but it would be nice to easily give those 5% something that works and is easy to read, so this fits the bill quite nicely.
Visit ➔How to send the perfect HTML e-mail
Why? Well, an e-mail is not a webpage. A webpage is on the web. It’s viewed by a web browser. An e-mail gets displayed in a mail user agent (MUA). E-mails get indexed by software that is calibrated for coping with text/plain. The point of HTML is that it’s a representation format for hypertext documents. I have yet to see an e-mail that wouldn’t be better as text/plain. And, yes, other people disagree. I don’t particularly give a shit. E-mail means text/plain.
I used to agree with the whole ‘html emails are evil‘ schtick until I realised that there’s actually no good reasoning to back up that viewpoint whatsoever (it was – of course – at the point where I had to justify my ‘emails we send have to be in plain text’ in a work related context).
Other then the faintly religious ‘html email is bad cos we say so’ argument, what exactly is wrong with it?
We wouldn’t argue that web pages should be plain text, would we? I fail to see how this is different considering the proliferation of html supporting email clients, and surely no-one is really arguing that we shouldn’t be able to use such basic things as headings, bold and italics? Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of bad html email out there but that doesn’t mean the medium itself is bad.
Visit ➔