David Emery Online

Mind the troll

Well, my broadband is back working – I’m slightly surprised, having read so much about Bulldog’s appalling customer service.

While I was gone, a momentous event happened for this site;

A milestone.

A joyous occasion.

I got my first troll!

He’s bounced around the latest set of iPod/Zune posts, posting rapid arguments about his hatred for all things Apple. There’s some real comedy gold in there, so it’s might be worth digging through the latest posts to check them out – in one, he says iTunes is just a rip off of RealPlayer, which actually made me laugh out loud!

It touches on some of the points that Tom Coates has been blogging about recently – namely that of ethical blogging, and how you deal with commentors. I have so far left all of the posts up, and responded to them as well (as it’s quite fun), baring a couple which were crude and very sweary which I replaced the text so that people could see a comment was there.

I think that, in general, if you’re going to allow comments on your site you should really try and censor them as little as possible – the ideal would be not at all, but there’s a...

Disconnected

Bulldog have rather nicely suspended my broadband service, which means that until they fix it I’m not really going to be able to blog.

Hopefully it shouldn’t take too long to fix…

Devastating

At work we’ve just launched the new site for the band Devastations:

devastations.net

As per normal, it’s all based on Textpattern which is by far and away the easiest and most flexible blog engine out there at the moment. I’ve recently been playing around with Wordpress, and while their are some things I like – the look of the interface is much nicer then Textpattern, although it’s laid out oddly in places – it doesn’t seem to be as easily customisable like Textpattern is.

Zune Doom

Today, Microsoft officially launched Zune – it’s brand spanking new iPod clone (I was going to say competitor, but…).

Quite, frankly; it sucks.

The disk space is low (30gb), the screen is the same size and rez as the iPod, it plays the same formats as the iPod and the major two features it has that the iPod doesn’t have – built in radio (which is extra on the iPod) and wireless sharing – are features that simply don’t interest me at all.

Going back to the wireless songs sharing – what it allows you to do is share a song with a fellow Zune owner, and they can listen to it for a whole 3 times, over a huge 3 days.

Wow.

Isn’t that great.

I fail to see why anybody would ever do this, in the current climate where you can easily get access to almost every song for free, anywhere. You might as well just hit the bands MySpace and listen to the song there – you get as much utility from the crappy flash player as you do from the Zune. It comes back to one of the main tenants of the iTunes Store’s success – the FairPlay DRM for most...

iGamePodBoy

Nuts!

Drat!

Bugger!

I had a whole interesting post planned about the new iPod games, and how they are structured (they’re actually zipped up folders, with fairly heavy duty anti-tamporing measures), and then I read this when I get home:

Dan Dickinson: Dissecting iPod Games

So, if you would like to imagine that I wrote all that (you may need to mentally insert some slightly dodgy grammar, and remove some of the detail for the correct experience) that’d be great…

Thanks.

However, I think iPod games are almost certainly more interesting then the movie announcement (from my point of view, at least). I downloaded Tetris today, and it’s perfect – I always have my iPod with me, and I’m normally using it for listening to music (so I don’t want to watch video), so being able to pass the time playing Tetris just works. The screen and scroll wheel both lend themselves to gaming – more then a mobile does, at least.

Mobile is of course the inspiration for the games, and from my digging it appears that not only is it the inspiration, they actually are mobile games. Tetris at least is made by a company called JamDat, who is owned by Electronic Arts and makes...

Apple hits it out the park

I was privileged enough to attend the live telecast of the Apple “Showtime” event today, and boy – was it a good one. Sometimes the Apple rumour mill gets so ridiculous that almost no matter what happens it seems like a disappointment. Not this time, though. A quick rundown below:

Mildly updated big iPods: Obviously these weren’t the touch-screen iPods that some people were expecting, but I wasn’t – the current big iPods are a very nice package, and the addition of more storage, brighter screen and longer battery are obviously welcome ones. It didn’t need anything else, to be honest. The mild software tweaks – searching and letter pop-up on scroll – both look like they’ve been implemented really well and just put the iPod even further ahead of the competition.

iPod Games: This is a very interesting move from Apple – it’s the first time they’ve opened up the iPod to external software developers in any way – it’ll be interesting to see if they allow other developers to start developing for it (my guess: not yet, but eventually). I can see the iPod game market becoming pretty large, and I think the price – £3.99/game – is the right...

Five Years

It seems both incredible that five years have already gone past, but also amazing how much has changed in that time.

Everybody has their own personal story and viewpoint on the day itself and the after effects it had, and I find it very hard to pin down exactly how much the world has changed since then; I have a feeling that it hasn’t really, more my perception of it.

It was the first historic “where were you when…” that I witnessed or was alive and paying attention for, at least, and I think that – more then anything – had the most profound affect on me. Suddenly, things like Pearl Harbour, JFK’s assassination, the assorted IRA attacks on London and many more all resonated with me that much more. I had never even realised or thought that I would witness something on that scale; not so much because I didn’t think that that kind of thing could happen, but more because it never occurred that it would.

Of course, the world really has changed in that intervening time – and it’s probably worth noting that the US deaths in Iraq are now approaching the deaths at the World Trade Center – but...

Browser Interfaces

One of the more popular interface patterns that have come to the fore recently is the “Browser” design. By browser, I don’t mean web browser, but the UI used that was first popularised by NeXT (to my knowledge, I would be surprised if it hadn’t been done somewhere else first) and hence later the Mac OS X Finder, where it is called column view. The basic premiss is that you can drill down a hierarchy, with the previous steps shuffling out of the way so that you can focus on the active pane, and quickly get to the information you want.

After the Mac OS X Finder, the next major application to use this UI widget was iTunes, with its “Browse” view. This is fairly important, as almost everybody has used iTunes, so it’s a fair assumption that everybody has probably used a browser interface, and hence the learning time is minimal. In iTunes, it works particularly well, as iTunes typically contains a large amount of data, which is always sorted into a hierarchy (genre->artist->album).

However, iTunes is also responsible for the widest used and most popular implementation of the browser interface: the iPod.

Facing the same requirements as iTunes – the easy...

DRM Free

In the last week or two, both Windows media DRM and also iTunes FairPlay DRM have been cracked, allowing users to strip out the DRM and convert them to other formats. The windows media crack has already been patched, and I imagine it won’t be too long before Apple patches iTunes as well; I guess we’ll get a new version on Tuesday, with the special event that’s occurring (which I’m going to – the London telecast at least). I imagine we’ll get the iTunes Film Store, along with at least new Nanos, maybe new normal iPods and a small possibility of something else.

However, going back to DRM for a minute – I think these cracks are a signpost that points to the move away from DRM. The main indicator, though, is MySpace’s announcement that they are enabling bands to sell mp3s through MySpace. Now, the deal for artists isn’t that great – from what I hear MySpace’s cut is $0.45 per song, which is more then what iTunes takes (about $0.35), so limits how cheap artists can sell their songs.

While the deal isn’t great, it’s still incredibly compelling – why would you not sell your songs, when it takes so...

Web 3D

One of the more interesting talks at BarCamp London was Matt West’s talk on 3d using JavaScript. In it he showed how you can use javascript as a software renderer to render basic 3d using the canvas tag – which only WebKit/Safari, Mozilla/Firefox and Opera support. The demo was pretty impressive, and the library it’s based on – Canvastastic – has support for gouraud shading and basic primitives; it takes me right back to when I was a game developer…

However, one thing – no matter how impressive it was (very!), it’s not actually useful. To start, the lack of IE support almost kills it dead before it’s even really got going. Coupled with the fact that it really needs a MacBook Pro or better to run at a decent frame rate, and the lack of texturing support mean that it’s potential for use in the real world is limited at best.

After having seen the talk I started to think about the possibilities that would be opened up if we did have decent 3d capabilities in browser. Obviously at the moment we can do 3d using Shockwave-Flash, and it actually works reasonably well – it has gpu support, so games...