David Emery Online

Burnt Coals

37signals have just launched Campfire , their latest online app – and this time they’re going after the realtime project communication space.

I’m a big 37singnals fan – I use Backpack daily, for all sorts of different things, but I’m not convinced by this latest addition to their product stable. The interface is very nice on the whole – it shares the clean look with their other products, and hence usability is high. My only slight quibble is the scroll bar – when you have a chat that is longer then your browser window, you get a scroll bar on the far left of the window (like you’d expect), but when you scroll it only moves the chat section – the rest of the page stays fixed. Very strange – I guess they decided a scroll bar on the chat section looked ugly, but it’s a big usability sacrifice if you ask me.

The feature set is nice – it does all the things you’d want, and nothing more (a common trait of 37signal’s apps), but I can’t ever see myself using it (unlike all of their other products). All of...

Hello, hello, hello

Some of you may have noticed the sudden resurgence of posts here – it got to the point that I was only posting about once a month, which really isn’t enough to keep a blog going (although with the prevalence RSS it matters less these days then it used to).

So, I’m now shooting for a once-a-work-day schedule.

Now, I know I’m not going to be able to keep this up all the time, so don’t get too cosy, but if I aim for it, hopefully I’ll get into the habit of posting a lot more frequently.

It also means the sheer amount of rubbish I post will go up exponentially.

Luckily, I doubt anyone will notice.

When I first started this blog, I really hoped that it wouldn’t degenerate into yet another dead blog, without a post on for months – I’m not going to let that happen.

To any of you that have a blog that has died; post on it today!

Web UI

Yahoo have just released a UI library for online apps – bravo to them, and all that.

I’m hoping that this sort of thing will become more widespread – and while in some ways I’d prefer to see something come out of the non-comercial sector, so that we don’t inadvertently become locked in to another commercial development platform, this library looks like it’s under a nice licence, so I’m not going to complain to much.

However, at the moment it still looks like it only skims the surface of the functionality we could be building into a web UI library; where’s the split view, for example? Or a good rich text editor? It’ll be really great when we have robust, proven widgets that handle most of our day to day web app functionality, and even better if the majority starts using them – maybe then we’ll get some interface consistency on the web…

Clear The Decks

Yes, it’s that time of the month; it’s music time (sorry).

Recently, a little band called Giant Drag have really caught my, err, ear. The combination of surprisingly heavy guitars, female vocals and a habit of not taking themselves too seriously is a winner, in my eyes at least. Hop over to 3hive to take a listen to some tracks; I think the album “Hearts and Unicorns” is out on the 27th in the uk.

Another band on my radar that I’d like to draw your attention to is The Raconteurs (also know as “Jack White’s New Band”). With Jack from the White Stripes teaming up with Brendan Benson and most of The Greenhornes, it’s really great to hear Jack get a full band behind him. Think White Stripes meets Led Zep, with a dash of 60s Pop.

You can hear some tracks on their very retro site. The site hits on a real bugbear of mine, actually, as it’s utterly inaccessible, relying on you to press numbers on the keyboard to get around the site. I really wish the music industry as a whole would get their collective head out their ass...

Shiny!

Would you like to know how to achieve the reflection effect I use on most of the pictures I post here? Apple have actually implemented something similar in the latest versions of Pages and iWeb (although it lacks a shadow that really makes the effect shine), but if you want to do it yourself here’s how (you’ll need Adobe Photoshop, although I’m sure you can probably manage it with Photoshop Elements or the GIMP to):

Step 1

Firstly, open up Photoshop and create a blank document that’s the size of you image, plus a little bit at each side and about half the height again at the bottom.

Then, place your image in the middle at the top of your document.

Step 2

Next, create a new layer underneath the layer containing your image, and using the Elliptical Marquee Tool draw a thin oval at the bottom of your image...

Plagiarism looses marks

Songbird is the very definition of bloatware.

It’s also a perfect example of software design without imagination.

“I know”, says one slightly bored programmer to the other, “Let’s make a music player like iTunes”

“Great idea! Why don’t we build in a web browser too, ‘cause every music player needs to browse the web”

“Brilliant!”

Quite why songbird is based on firefox and has a whole browser built in possibly nobody knows – my only guess is that they were so busy copying iTunes when they came to the music store they decided they needed something similar.

Don’t get me wrong – I would really quite like to see a credible alternative to iTunes; decent competition always works best for the market, and we’d no doubt get more interesting new features because of it. Songbird, however, is just a simple rip off – quite nice in the places they’ve directly copied iTunes, but abysmal where they’ve done something on their own.

Also, their site doesn’t fit on 800×600…

C-, Please try harder

I'm not dead

One of the many, many things I’ve been working on recently is the site for the Truck Festival – again another quick site (“Could you do a site for the Truck Festival for Sunday?” – asked on Friday) and again powered by Textpattern – rapidly becoming my tool of choice for almost every site I build.

Also – Welcome all you Sandvox users! Now that Sandvox has gone public I’ve noticed a surge in hits from Karelia.com, so I hope all you guys like my themes (for all of those that don’t know, Sandvox is a really nice web site creator made by the people behind Watson, and I created the Aqua, This Modern Life, Open All Night, Brown & Green, Grey Leaf, NeoNews, Rounded Blue, Simply Purple, Sunburst and Trippy Bubbles themes for it)!

Sadly though, as no doubt you are all aware Apple has rather taken the shine of the initial release of Sandvox with the announcement of iWeb – they two programs are surprisingly different when you get down to it, baring in mind they solve similar problems, but it remains to be seen whether the market is...

R.I.P. Bookmarks

Bookmarks are dead.

Seriously.

I haven’t used a bookmark in a browser for literally years. This was originally born out of necessity, as I jump around from browser to browser on a week by week basis (currently I’m using Safari with Saft and SafariStand, but if Omni get there act together I’ll jump back to OmniWeb), so having my bookmarks tied a specific browser got old really quickly. To solve this, I re-made by bookmarks structure into folders containing .webloc files (Mac OS X web link files), which I kept in my dock. This system was further refined by my uptake of Quicksilver which allows me to just to type in the first few letters of the bookmark and it finds it instantly.

So…

While I moved my bookmarks over to using Quicksilver, I also started using feeds with a vengeance. I’ve now got to the point where I’ve got ~380 feeds in my feed reader (Bloglines – I’d love to use an online reader that uses ajax and looks a bit nicer, but there aren’t any with a decent interface) which means that the only sites I use bookmarks for are sites without...

I told you I was busy

I’ve just finished work on the new site for Goldrush – you can check them out in London on Monday if you’re in the area. All based on Textpattern (which I also use to run this site), and it came together in just over a week, from design to going live, which isn’t too bad I think.

You can see it here.

Recently at work we launched the new site for record label 4AD – home of the Pixies, the Breeders, TV On The Radio and loads more.

It’s a mammoth site – we have over 3gb of images up there for the various artists, thousands and thousands of words (the artist profile for the Pixies is over 3 pages long, for example), and a digital download store – and I was responsible for good chunks of the design and functionality. It was great to work on such a high profile, complex site.

Another site I’ve worked on recently was this site to help promote The White Stripes latest single, The Denial Twist. This was quite...

Why, why, why. Why?

Many apologies for the lack of posts recently; things are coming precariously close to overwhelming me at the moment, but I just about seem to be beating back the tide.

Of course, not having blogged in a few weeks means there’s a few things I need to get off my chest:

• OPML: So many people seem to be hyping opml up at the moment – why? It’s just a fairly boring file format for storing lists of stuff – so what?

• OPML Editor: possibly the worst piece of software I’ve used in 5 years. Maybe this kind of thing passes muster on the PC, but the mac version seems to hail from the early nineties in interface design and feature set.

• Web 2.0: What exactly is it again? Oh, wait; no one knows…

• “Social” software: Sorry folks, I couldn’t care less about sharing my bookmarks with the world; or putting pictures of my non-existant cats online. Whilst obviously some social software has many benefits, and has broken into the mainstream (like email and instant messaging), most of the new stuff out there really isn’t going to appeal to that many people.

• Apple...