David Emery Online

A good year for music

Since my overdosing on music related posts in December, I’ve really not talked about what I’ve been listening to much – time to fix that I think!

By far the best album gracing my iPod at the moment is the new Modest Mouse album, “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank”. I’ll be honest, I’ve not been the hugest Modest Mouse fan up till this point – I liked their last one but it didn’t blow me away. This one, though, is a different kettle of fish entirely – it’s packed full of really, really good songs that always do things slightly unexpected in a lovely way.

Also new is the Bloc Party album but unlike the Modest Mouse album, it’s a real disappointment. Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of good bits on the record, but they never quite coalesce into a song, let alone an album. Completely unlike the much talked about Klaxons album, which is simply brilliant – full of good bits that work really well as songs. It’s actually surprising – in a nice way – that an album and band that has had so much hype has been able to deliver.

Having said all...

Return of MacBook

So, a mere five weeks after it broke, my MacBook has finally returned from some TLC in the hands of Apple. Hence, this is another short post – I’m on quite a run now, managing only two vaguely substantial posts last week, but I have all sorts of installing and tweaking to do.

Miraculously, Apple have actually fixed everything I wanted them to; I got a new logic board and HD, both if which were expected, but I also got a new top case (which is the inner top bit, including the keyboard and trackpad). I did point out when it went in that I had discolouration, a dodgy down arrow and a mushy trackpad key but I wasn’t sure if they’d bother fixing them.

Other then the 5 week delay – which would have been a major inconvenience if it wasn’t for my work MacBook Pro – the service has been very good. I actually went through John Lewis as opposed to Apple, as I couldn’t be bothered with the absurd waiting times/booking system at the Apple Store, and they were very good (and were where I bought the thing from, as they offer a free 2yr warranty).

All in...

Friday Links III

A faster way to speed up Mail.app – I initially dismissed this as pure voodoo (like repairing permissions), but it really actually works – Mail.app has gone from sluggish to speedy!

NME.COM hears new White Stripes songs – I was at the same event as NME, and the new White Stripes songs are amazing. At least as good as anything they’ve done before; I’m very excited.

VMware Desktop Virtualization for Mac – the latest beta apparently has experimental 3d accelerated graphics support.

BBC News Headlines Timeline – Matthew Somerville showed this off at BarCamp a couple of weeks ago, and it’s a really nice bit of work.

Smart Moves

Adobe is undergoing an interesting transition at the moment. Ever since their merger with Macromedia, they seem to have become re-invigorated. The CS3 suite looks like it’s going to be pretty good – Photoshop is certainly going to be the biggest upgrade it’s had for a while.

However, what’s most interesting is what Adobe – traditionally very much a desktop application developer – is doing online. Flash has won the online video distribution battle thanks to YouTube, and the mistakes of Flash’s past have been realised and worked around. Couple this with Flex and Apollo and you can see that Adobe is certainly very interested in building web development tools.

What’s even more interesting is that they now seem to be interested in utilising their home-grown tools for their own ends, as they’ve just announced an online version of Photoshop. This is a big shot across the bows of any other web application developer – “Hi, we’re Adobe – one of the biggest software developers in the business. We’d really like to dominate your bit of the market too, if that’s all right with you?”.

Their are so many interesting points about this announcement; it’s obviously going to be based on Flex/Flash,...

Overloaded

As suspected, today has been a dead loss.

Brain full.

Time lost.

Go read The Perry Bible Fellowship instead – this is a good place to start.

I’ll try harder tomorrow.

Promise.

Busy, busy, busy

Sadly, today is yet another one of those days.

Yes, it’s a “I’m too busy to blog” day.

It’s not so much that I don’t have time to blog – always a lie, that, as it takes no more then 30 minutes – more that I don’t have the spare brain capacity to think straight.

To be honest, I’m bad enough when I think I can think straight, so I don’t wish to inflict you too many words today.

While I would love to say “I’ll be back with a proper post tomorrow”, this week is looking like a bit of a right-off; too many things to do, not enough time, not enough time to figure out the things we should do taking into account the lack of time etc.

I am, of course, complaining far too much. It is much better to be busy then quiet, and I think long term some things happening this week could work out quite well. That doesn’t help for my writing here, though…

I’m still sticking to one post per week day though; if I give up that, I probably wouldn’t post again, and I’d like to think that would be a bad thing.

Cars

It suddenly occurred to me yesterday that I’ve accidentally left out one of my main interests off this blog:

Cars.

Yes – of course – being male and, well that’s it really for stereotypes, I have a great interest in cars. However, I think I’m not quite in it for the same reasons as most people that like cars are; from anecdotal evidence and from reading magazines like Evo it seems to be all about speed. This should come as no surprise, as it taps into the primeval desire for power, but it’s not really why I’m interested.

Simply put, cars are some of the most beautifully designed objects created today.

The only real rival in terms of scale of design would be architecture – which I also have an interest in – but buildings end up being too compromised by function, and too large to have the details truly honed. The design of a car is so fundamentally important – it is probably the deciding factor in most car purchases – and their are few other markets where design is so relevant.

When I say design, I really do mean design; the blend of form and function, not just aesthetics. Don’t get me...

Friday Links II

Michael Arrington calls for a end to the BBC – Michael said some reasonably good things in his presentation at Future of Web Apps, but he’s way, way off base here.

Daring Fireball: Would Apple Mix DRM and Non-DRM Music at the iTunes Store? – John makes some good points, but I still think Apple won’t want to add another point of confusion to the iTMS.

Tom Morris: Twitter Tube Tracker – Very useful; nice work Tom!

My Free Download from Warner – Giving away free mp3s is not marketing. Sometimes I worry that at work we’re not quite keeping up with the rest of the web and then I see things like this…

YouTube AudioSwap – Interesting first steps into allowing editing, which surely they’re going to do soon.

Argue every day

Politics.

Religion.

Never discuss at a party; never bring up at work. Common knowledge, you would think.

People are different.
People think differently.

You know this. I know this. We know this.

Right?

So why does everybody seem to forget?

Blithely going along assuming that everyone is going to agree with you, only to be shocked when they don’t.

Ok. So. This happens once. Twice. Once a week. Twice a week. Once a day.

Every fucking 10 minutes.

You’d think they’d realise. Anticipate. Negotiate.

Adapt.

Future of Web Apps

So, Future of Web Apps has now drawn to a close and I think a good time was probably had by all – I certainly had one, at least. The common theme of all the presentations seemed to focus around simplicity and community – that and trying to say “Web 2.0” as many times per presentation as possible.

A lot of the talk on both simplicity and community was really good; Khoi Vinh had some interesting things to say about not overwhelming users with too many features or too much content, and the guys from Moo echoed his comments on keeping it simple – it’s a philosophy I very much agree on.

The folks from Moo also re-iterated how much the little details matter – things like hiding secret messages in the packaging, or using the best possible paper stock – and how this has to extend through the entirety of your organisation. This is especially true for any aspect that has direct contact with the customer, including customer support.

On the topic of community, they pointed out how the details they spent the time creating provided interesting stories for their customers to latch on to – a very effective way...