David Emery Online

Broken Boy

I haven’t talked about music here in a while – at least music that I’m not working on at least – so here you go!

Obviously on heavy rotation is the Raconteurs album, “Broken Boy Soldiers”, which came out last week. It’s very, very good – not as good as the early White Stripes albums, but certainly better then their last. Of course it’s not a White Stripes album, but does sound exactly like you’d expect from a combination of Jack White and Brendan Benson. The best track is the title track, if you want to download it.

Also in my playlist at the moment is the new Hot Chip album, “The Warning”. It sounds pretty much like their first album, which is no bad thing at all. In addition, a new band called Tapes ‘n Tapes is also worth checking out – they were apparently the hot thing at this years SXSW. Oh yes, I mustn’t forget the Metric album as well, it’s brilliant and if you can’t be bothered to get the whole album at least seek out the single “Monster Hospital” – possibly the best song I’ve heard this year.

As well...

Lull

Hmmm. Not too much going on at the moment.

tumbleweed rolls past

I’ve got a whole raft of things at work that are going to launch soon-ish, but nothing I can show you guys at the moment. The redesign of de-online is going nicely – it’ll be completely fluid (finally!), and have some natty tricks up it’s sleeve as well.

Since my post on YouTube I’ve seen two stories about potential competitors; from both AOL and also Yahoo. It doesn’t surprise me in the least – this area is only get more and more competitive, and someone at some point is going to find a decent business model to support it. Don’t forget, of course, that we’re talking about the future of TV here – online video distribution like YouTube is the future of broadcast, there’s no doubt about it.

It'll only cause trouble

It has come to my attention that the Apple service manual for the new Macbook has a rather curious part of the troubleshooting section.

Right next to “Microsoft Office applications will not open” and “Computer will not start, LED blinks” is a curious new addition:

“Windows XP will not install correctly”

Yes, Apple is now telling it’s authorised repair technicians how to troubleshoot installing Windows.

How the world changes…

Youster? NapTube?

YouTube is the new Napster.

The main original reason people started going to YouTube was the copyrighted content, such as TV shows etc.

YouTube is also pre dot-com bubble burst.

While still continuing to have a huge amount of users even though they’ve mostly removed the good content, YouTube now face a much bigger problem: Money. Or the lack of it.

YouTube seem to be running their business in the same way everybody else did, before we realised that we had to, you know, actually make some money at some point. From what I hear, YouTube are burning through about $1million/month in bandwidth alone. And yet, other then venture capital, they don’t really have a revenue stream. They claim that they are advertising based – but they don’t really have any – go on, have a look; I couldn’t find any.

Venture capital really isn’t a business model.

Mark my words*, YouTube won’t be the biggest video site anymore in 2007, and quite possibly won’t exist at all by 2008.
—
* Yes, a prediction. I reserve the right to re-write this paragraph in 2007.

Pressurised Wallet

As you are no doubt probably aware, Apple have just annouced their iBook replacement, the MacBook.

They seem to be pretty much perfect. Sure, it would be nice to have a better graphics card, but it’s still better then the one that was in there previously; don’t forget that Apple has been putting such rubbish graphics cards in it’s machines for so long that almost anything is better. And that includes integrated Intel graphics.

I’m most impressed though by Apple’s balls.

I mean, without being too crass, that’s what it takes to make an simple change in colour cost £90.

What’s even more impressive is that I think I’d get the black one if I was buying, so their transparent non-addition of features works.

Thom

Could I be any more excited?

At work we’ve just announced that we’re going to be putting out Thom Yorke’s forthcoming solo record, “The Eraser”.

I am a huge Radiohead fan, so working on stuff for Thom’s album, including this mini site is great fun – I’ve been buzzing for weeks about it, but unable to tell anyone!

It’s quite amusing though, as I am hugely excited, but you don’t really find anyone else in the music industry that gets too excited about anything – I guess it’s just not cool to be excited.

And it’s all about being cool.

Of course, it’s a huge help that the artwork is so great – my job really does rely on the original artwork, moulding it and editing it to make something that works as a web site. But then, it’s not as thought the artwork was going to be bad, is it?

So Pretty

At work we’ve just launched a new site for Pretty Girls Make Graves. It’s another Textpattern powered site, and also uses the Lightbox 2 javascript library to do the photo fading, which was so easy to drop in I think I may use it on pretty much every gallery I do for the foreseeable future…

Also, check out the music while you’re there; they’re very good.

Three

It’s funny; I haven’t launched any sites in a while now (at least a month) but we’re probably going to do 3 this week…

Although I’d like to write more – so busy! – I’ve got a few quick thoughts about E3 going on at the moment; it’s all a bit of a let down, really.

Microsoft really didn’t do anything interesting – they’re in a good position at the moment, have a big installed base before Nintendo and Sony get there, but they simply didn’t announce anything surprising or innovative at all. The Halo 3 trailer looks good, but that’s not coming out till next year. Same story with GTA4 – nice to know it won’t be PS3 exclusive, but again not coming out for over a year. The other stuff, like “Live anywhere”, where you can continue games in a limited fashion across Xbox PC and mobile phones sounds, well, pointless really. I can see a limited value in being able to create content on a PC for use on an Xbox, but that’s about it really. It is, however, a limited play into the MySpace style space, what with the friends list support (including voice and video chat) across...

Happy Google Day

It’s Google Day!

Read all about it

At the time of writing, only Google Trends is up and running (I would say that it’s surprising for Google to mess up with these kind of details, but to be honest they do it a lot). Google Trends does seem to be pretty cool though, quickly creating trend graphs on any topic, and easily comparing multiple trends.

It’s a good Google product, then, not a bad one.

Google Notebook sounds promising – I like the direction – but they are going to have there work cut out trying to beat Backpack which sounds like a direct competitor. Google Notebook is apparently launching next week, which again strikes me as a bit odd; they obviously couldn’t get it ready in time, but it sounds like a really simple app. I suppose we’ll find out next week…

Google Co-op I currently just simply don’t get – I’m waiting till I can use it before passing judgement, but the concept – allowing people to directly contribute to Google, and then allowing users to subscribe to different contributors – certainly sounds intriguing.

Back Broken

Many a sentence has been written recently about Ajax, and it’s possibility of getting into a big usability mess again – just over we got over the last one.

I am, of course, talking about the back button.

Many moons ago, we used technologies like frames, and made our entire site in one flash file (please ignore the fact that people still do – the difference is that we now know they’re wrong). One of the side effects of using either frames or flash is that it completely brakes the back button – when you navigate around the site you can’t press the back button to go back.

Bad web designer!

Now, with Ajax, we can have exactly the same problem. If you use Ajax (which is essentially just loading page content on demand using javascript) to do your page navigation, yep, you guessed it; the back button breaks.

So don’t do that, ok?

However, there are plenty of things that at the moment you can use the back button for, which you really shouldn’t be able to – these things are perfect for ajax.

For example, say you have a simple content management system, and you click the “delete post” button. On most systems, that’ll load...