David Emery Online

Trucking

Check, check, check it out: The new Truck Records website

Many late nights died to bring you this site…

Yes, I really do make this many sites – I really must get around to updating my portfolio page. I think it might be quite long.

Campfire Redux

Have a look here – 37signals have made some slight but significant changes to Campfire, their online chat application.

Most interesting, I think, is the move changing the 30 day trial into a more standard “free” account. This changes Campfire so it matches the model of 37signals other apps, but does mean that people now have less reason to upgrade. It also means that it’s highly likely that they’ll get more people using Campfire – even if they’re not paying.

So is more users better then fewer users, but more that pay?

I also find their upgrade of “color picker” strange, but then I find the colour picker odd in all 37signals apps (the colour picker, for those uninformed, lets you customise the colour of your pages in Campfire/Backpack/etc) – for a company that prides itself in simplicity and a minimal feature set, it seems to be a completely unnecessary feature.

Their rapid development of Campfire is to be applauded, though I still haven’t found a situation I’d use it in.

Dregs

There’s a curious lack of “things” going on at the moment. Even though we’ve just had Etech, and we’ve got Sxsw happening as we speak I haven’t really seen anything worth talking about from the last couple of days.

Going through the dregs, one thing of semi-interest is the new version of Microsoft’s live.com (Firefox or IE only). There’s some interesting tech in there – the image search is certainly very promising – but I really don’t like their “infinite scrollbar”; it really clashes with my traditional way of quickly scrolling through results. I’d much rather just have, say 100-200 results per page instead, and have a normal scroll bar. All in all, there’s some interesting tech in there, but it still needs working on.

Rinse, Repeat

Another day, another new site…

Launched yesterday was the new Piney Gir Site. This time round the main art was done by a chap called Mike Norris, which I took and websiteified. Yet another Textpattern powered site, of course!

Bash, Bash, Bash

So Microsoft’s “Origami” = a “Ultra Mobile PC”, or UMPC for short.

Yuk

Who, exactly, wanted one of those? And why do big companies insist on taking a great product name – origami – and rebranding to a really bad one at the last minute (Microsoft isn’t the only one that do this, but they’re particularly guilty of it)?

So big. Such short battery life. No specialised interface for PDA functionality ( nasty thumb keyboards aside ).

Why the hype?

The Xbox and Xbox 360 show that Microsoft can get this sort of thing right, but they seem to have really blown it on this one. And while I’m on the subject of Microsoft – have you seen the new Office 2007 screenshots?

Check them out here

Yes, that’s right folks – they’ve got rid of the nice looking (but in dire need of some constancy) interface of the previous betas and replayed it with something awful. Even with the black skin it looks nasty, and the big gloopy circa Mac OS X 10.0 “Office” button is a very strange addition. Admittedly, the new look is a lot more consistent from what I can see – the old style had about a dozen different button...

Music-Pass

Apple have just launched a new pricing model for the iTunes Video Store – Multi-Pass – which allows you to pay an up front fee and get new episodes downloaded automatically to your iTunes when they’re available. It’s a really great model to use for episodic TV shows, which is what it’s being used for at the moment, and trumps other subscription based services as you get to keep the content after your multi-pass runs out.

In fact, in many ways, it turns an episodic TV show into something akin to a music album, except you get it broadcasted to you as each piece is finished instead of waiting till everything is complete.

So why not extend this model to music?

Pay up front the same price as a full length album, get the latest track immediately and then receive a new track every week until you’ve got, say, 10 tracks and your multi-pass runs out. Obviously the details could be changed around a bit, so you get a track every two weeks or whatever, but I think this could be a really powerful new model – half way between traditional singles and albums.

Each track...

Sisterhood

Hot off the presses is the new Rogers Sisters website.

It’s yet another textpattern powered site – although this one wasn’t quite as quick as some of the others I’ve done – packed with nifty little bits (try clicking on the photos in the sidebar, for example). Also, check out the ringtones on the downloads page – they’re gloriously naff-tastic!

Clever. Very Clever...

Copy and Paste for the web

What a great idea!

Check out the demo – very impressive, and it even works in Safari! It’s so simple as well – it works by copying a small snippet of xml, and then interpreting it correctly when you paste it back in. This means it’ll work across browsers – copy in IE then paste in Firefox, for example – and across web sites without any problem at all. You could even extend it and bridge between a normal desktop app and a web app – copy a table from word, then paste in your blog backend, for example.

Whether it’ll take off or not we shall see (I think it will – it’s too simple not to), but the functionality this kind of technology enables is immense. And coming out of Microsoft as well…

Design Vs Asthetics

Scoble has posted an interesting piece on anti-marketing design

I think that he raises some interesting points, but really misses a crucial point: design does not equal aesthetics. Google, for example, doesn’t seem to have a competent graphic designer on their staff – just look at their logo, all nasty bevels and garish colours. But boy do they have good interaction designers!

Another important point to ruminate on is whether sites such as Google, MySpace and Craig’s List have succeeded because of their “anti-design”, or in spite of it. All of the above have great, functional design (yes, even MySpace) but look like ass; but if they had great designs, would they really have not been successful? Of course, with a site like Google you’d have to be a pretty darn good designer to manage to get something that looked better without impacting on some of some of the stuff that makes the interface so good, such as the simplicity that focus’s you on the task at hand (searching), and the ultra lean page size.

I don’t think the majority of people really even notice design to a certain extent (otherwise why would...

Reality Check

An amusing conundrum I’ve noticed:

The people we’d most like to have blog – the interesting, the famous, the intelligent – don’t have a blog; they have better things to do with their time.

While blogging has made a significant impact on the world, when you boil down to it it’s never going to be too earth shattering. Yes, traditional media will be forever changed (but when have they really stayed the same?). Yes, it allows personal free speech an accessibility that we’ve never seen before (but does anybody really care?).

But really, does anybody care what people write on their blogs?

Obviously some people do (you’re likely one of them as you’re reading this), but out the population as a whole the amount of people who read blogs on a daily basis is an insignificant fraction.

Blogs are just a type of website; not a replacement for most websites and really not much different from the mid-late nineties “homepages”. When the hype moves on, and the dust settles down (which it’s already starting to do), firstly we’ll end up with a lot less blogs, and secondly we probably won’t be able see any real difference from before.

I read a lot of sites on a...