David Emery Online

Cufon

Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set:

• No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client
• Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market
• Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases
• Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text

And now, after nearly a year of planning and research we believe that these requirements have been met.

This looks very promising – it’s so much faster then sIFR (which I reluctantly use here) – to the extent it’s as fast as real text is to load. All the need to do is support :hover states for links and I’ll switch wholesale.

End Game: Spotify on the iPhone

Spotify, the cloud-based music service whose catalog includes all of the major labels and lots of indies, is coming soon to the iPhone. […] This is all assuming that Apple/AT&T and other wireless gatekeepers permit the service. Apple has been notoriously resistant to the idea of music subscriptions.

I don’t see why Apple would refuse a potential Spotify app considering they have not only accepted the Last.fm app – which does similar things – they’re using it on their TV ads. However, with the state of wireless connectivity the way it is at the moment – in central London at least – I’m not going to get too excited just yet. I’ve had a go at using assorted streaming music apps on my iPhone and unless you have access to WiFi for at least some of the time they don’t well enough to get mass adoption. Most people aren’t going put up with long buffer times and drop outs half way through songs.

On a slightly unrelated note I find it very strange that in the Spotify desktop app (and replicated in the forthcoming iPhone app) there’s no way to ‘browse’ the music, only to search. I pretty much live in the browse mode in iTunes, and it seems like a much more natural way of getting round a large music catalogue – typically when I’m faced with a new Spotify window I get paralysed by choice; I know there’s practically everything there, so instantly I can’t remember one band I want to listen to to type in the search box.

Super Furry Animals

We’ve just launched the new site for the Super Furry Animals. It’s not a full blown, all singing-all-dancing affair with lots of sections – instead, it’s a very focused site to promote their forthcoming album which is available on March 16th. Every day there’s going to be a new bit of video shot by them on 4 cameras from their studio – they’ve shot over 4 hours of footage that we’re going to put up one episode a day over the next few weeks.

And of course, on the web-dev tip, try resizing your window (finally figured out how to maxmise the size of the video without cropping)…

U2: New album preview – exclusively on Spotify

If you choose to listen to the U2 album exclusive listening party on Spotify, your email we will be shared with the Universal Music Group and U2’s management. UMG may then contact you to invite you to join the U2 Official Mailing List.

I don’t think this is a smart move on Spotify’s part. Sure, Universal will have made this mandatory for Spotify to get the exclusive but it now means that I don’t trust them with my details. It’s a very good way of pissing off your existing early-adopter user base.

Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?

Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?

No:

Hi from Last.fm, I’m one of the founders (and the original founder of audioscrobbler, the music tracking plugin).

I’m not going to write much right now because i’m rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue.

As far as I can tell, the author of this article got a “tip” from one person and decided to make a story out of it. Techcrunch is full of shit, film at 11.

Don’t believe anything you read on TechCrunch.

Looks Like Facebook Just Took The Top Spot Among Social Media Sites

This past December we reported on how Facebook was coming up on Blogger to steal its top spot among social media sites when measured by total unique visitors worldwide… Now, it appears as though Facebook has finally done it.

Facebook being big is hardly news. No, what’s interesting about this is if you take a look at the graph you’ll see that Flickr is pretty much even-stevens with Geocities.

Yes: Geocities.

iPhonetastic

The Wrong Kind of Breathtaking

This is just brilliant. The utter bollocks that traditionally comes hand in hand with professional design and art school is the reason why I originally decided not to go down that route (instead opting for this whole computer/internet malarky). I just can’t stand it.

The gravitational pull of Pepsi

I kind-of hope this is actually either a wind up or some misjudged marketing stunt.

CSS Animation

WebKit now supports explicit animations in CSS. As a counterpart to transitions, animations provide a way to declare repeating animated effects, with keyframes, completely in CSS.

Yet more nice improvements in WebKit, although I think they’re butting right up against the boundaries of what should be in CSS and what should be in javascript (not that there are elegant ways of doing this natively in javascript anyway).

What’s most impressive is that this is already supported on the iPhone, and the performance is exceptional – the leaves demo (which will only work in a recently nightly or on an iPhone) runs as smoothly on the iPhone as it does on my MacBook, but my MacBook uses 50% of its CPU while doing it…

Tips for a transformed twitter

I am wrong to lament what Twitter once was and should embrace it as a tool I can use. Nevertheless like everybody, I need to be careful how I use it. I do not believe Twitter users will allow the tool to be reduced to a broadcast mechanism for pimping the latest blog post or special offer.

Good to see I’m not the only person thinking along these lines.