David Emery Online

WWDC Predictions

Ah, it’s finally that wonderful time of year: Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference. This one I think should be a particularly good one, as we get to see what surprises 10.5 will bring – OS design is I think what Apple do best of all – and we should also get new PowerMacs as well (or Mac Pros, as they seem to be going to be called).

So, some predictions:

• The announcement of Mac Pros. These will look very similar to the current G5s but be intel based. I think we’ll get at least one quad processor model, along with more space for hard drives and an additional optical drive. I also think they they may feature some new hardware feature, but I don’t know what.

• To go with the Mac Pros we’ll also get a new range of displays, with built in iSights and remotes. 20”, 24” and 30” I think, but maybe with better resolutions then they do currently and definitely better LCD panels.

• 10.5. This will be the real meat of the keynote, and will certainly have the most interesting bits in it:

  • Resolution Independence: This one they’ve already announced, so it’s a bit of a given, but has some...

CSS Suxxx

Ok folks, this is just brilliant.

If you are reading this and are a web developer, or know a bit about web development and hence know what CSS is then you may well find the following extremely amusing:

Download CSS Suxx.mp3

Cansei De Ser Sexy are a great new band from Brazil, and they happen to shorten their name to “CSS”, leading to the wonderful song above.

I feel the same about CSS often.

Hope I brightened your day just a little. Right, back to work…

(Oh by the way – if anyone from the wonderful Sub Pop Records is reading and wants me to take the mp3 down, just drop me a line. Although judging from your excellent podcast, you guys are pretty cool with this sort of thing.)

Why Brand?

Is branding still important? More to the point, is branding still relevant online or is it more important then ever?

Take MySpace for example – what is their brand? Is it a good one? The logo is quite frankly appalling, and the message that the site tells me is “amateur”. However, obviously none of this matters in the slightest. MySpace’s users and target market either aren’t aware of the branding and the problems surrounding it (how generic is both the name and the logo?) or they simply don’t care.

Now, to counter this we have the iPod phenomenon. The iPod is all about the brand – the player itself is certainly better then its rivals, but not that much better. So in the iPod’s case the branding is hugely important – and we’re talking about a very similar demographic here as well (I’m sure the vast majority of MySpacers have iPods).

What gives?

It really boils down to what you are trying to sell.

It is, of course, all about the content; the fallacy of many branding exercises is the deluded notion that branding is important all of the time. In fact, the inverse is much more likely. In MySpace’s case the interesting content is...

Width Redemption

I finally feel redemption.

All these months that I’ve been banging on about fluid width sites and the perils of designing for a fixed window size have finally been recognised!*

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, July 31, 2006: Screen Resolution and Page Layout

The executive summary of his article is exactly what I’ve been saying for ages: most people use 1024×768, but not everyone uses it. To compound that, many people don’t maximise their windows anyway, so make sure your site is fluid and looks nice at a wide variety of resolutions and window sizes.

Back in the day – I’m talking pre-dotcom boom here – I was a big Jakob Nielsen fan. I still stand by that to a certain extent – if you are a web developer / designer you need to go and read every single article on the site, no questions asked. While some of the articles may be out of date, all of the logic behind them is valid and I think it really helps to get a bit of perspective some times.

However, I’m not really sure where he’s heading now. The site seems to feel really old – not from an aesthetics point of view, as it’s always looked...

End End End

Yesterday the news broke that E3 – the biggest game show of the year – has been cancelled next year.

Admittedly it turns out that the news was slightly incorrect – it’s merely downsizing – but that’s as good as a cancellation, as it means the big players most likely won’t bother going.

I’m really in two minds over the news. On one hand, the bonanza of news that accompanies a trade show is always fun in that kid-on-xmas-day way (and that reminds me, WWDC next week…) so it’ll be a shame to lose that for a couple of years until a natural successor appears. The GDC will probably take its place until then, but being an expensive developer event will mean that it can’t take the mantle over fully – I’m sure we’ll get something else soon enough.

On the other hand, do we really lose much by not having E3 (or it’s successor)?

It’s an ever more common trend that developers spend a lot of time and money getting ready for E3 that could almost certainly be better spent on actually making games. Of course, that’s not even considering the amount the publisher spends on a stand, booth-babes and related...

How about something that rhymes with dune?

Almost the only thing of note that happened whilst I was away was the announcement of the “Zune” by Microsoft.

Just don’t call it a iPod killer, whatever you do.

I think this move may be one of the most public displays of corporate fear I’ve ever seen. They’ve been trying to compete with the iPod almost since it came out, and have utterly failed at every turn. So they’ve decided to simply copy it, and add some fairly useless features. When I say copy it, though, I really mean it – down to the music store integration, and single vendor-ness. More on that latter, but first I’ll focus on the “new” features.

Why would I want Wi-Fi on my iPod Zune? How is that not going to eat battery life? I’ve never seen the point in it whenever it’s been rumoured for the iPod – unless they can figure out charging over Wi-Fi (then I’d be impressed!) then there’s no need for syncing over Wi-Fi as you do that when you charge. Social sharing of tracks and playlists to nearby Zune users? Why would you want to do that? And how does that fit with the DRM of their music store?

Talking...

MyCast

We’re in the middle a movement, a revolution, a “wave”. Just like when we had punk in the 70s, or the hippies in the 60s (or even all that rubbish in the 80s).

It’s happening right now.

The music industry is completely changing – which everybody is aware of, obviously. With the rise of the internet and things like the iPod the game started to change completely but that isn’t the revolution – that’s just the catalyst.

Of course, we’re not even really there yet. MySpace – the biggest indicator of all this – has had a profound effect, but it’s only just starting to really disrupt things. The kids these days – the same kids that were responsible for punk – can’t conceive of a world without both the internet, but more importantly can’t conceive of a world where they are not connected to their friends 24/7. They post their whole life on their MySpace, and the repercussions this is going to have, and the new way of thinking this brings is going to change everything.

The new musical artists coming on the scene are only just starting to represent this. As much as I am loath to mention the...

No Logo

The other major change I made with the redesign is the loss of my “de” logo. I’ve had that logo for at least 5 years, so I’m a little sad to see it go but it really had to be done.

For a start, it didn’t fit in with the new design particularly well – it doesn’t scale down to well – and does look a bit “tired”. The main reason was, however, a small epiphany:

Why do I need a logo at all?

In fact, why does any person (not company) need a logo?

Almost every personal site I go to has some form of logo, and really – their isn’t any point. Are you a brand? Does your logo create recognition with your readers? Logos make sense for companies; to help their customers recall them, and strengthen their brand but does any of this really make any sense for a personal site?

I don’t think so.

It’s all about the content; not some faux I’m-a-company branding exercise. Oh, and don’t get me started about the sheer number of freelance web designers whose sites look like they’re a company of multiple people. If you’re a single freelancer, just say so – it’s normally painfully obvious...

What's black, white and red all over?

Welcome to version 2 of my blog – I hope you like it!

I’ve been trying to get this out the door for a while now, so I’m really glad of finally done it. Their are all sorts of improvements (small ones, mostly) that I’ve been dying to do for ages, so here’s a quick list of the highlights:

1. I think most importantly, I’ve finally made the jump to a fluid width design. I was feeling increasingly hypocritical talking about how bad fixed width sites were with my old design, so now I can start feeling all self important again. This design also uses a touch of javascript to make the large images fluid as well (dynamically loading larger and smaller images as appropriate).
2. I’ve moved the blog up a directory, so that it sits at the root of the site. The site had essentially become just the blog for quite a while, so it seemed odd to keep it tucked away in a sub directory. I’ve set up a raft of redirect rules so that (hopefully) nothing should break (let me know if it does).
3. Now that I’m a lot more efficient with Textpattern, I’ve tidied up the comments section. Before it was...

Beware falling blocks

I’m back!

I had a mere ~10000 unread items in Bloglines to get through, but I think I’m all caught up now.

I’m going to keep this short and sweet as while I’ve been away I’ve done 90% of the work on my upcoming redesign, so hopefully within a couple of days round here should look a little different.

In the process, however, things may well look a little screwy for a while, so beware! Also, an apology to my rss readers as I have a sneaking suspicion the changes I’m going to make will make all my recent posts show up as new posts in my rss feed. Sorry!

UPDATE: OK, so as you may have noticed the redesign is progressing nicely. The rest will get done tomorrow – still got to backdate some new images for articles, populate the work section and then move the whole thing up a directory (so this page is the main page of de-online.co.uk). That’s going to be a little tricky (got to set up redirect rules for everything) so it’s going to have to wait till tomorrow.