David Emery Online

Choas Mk.2

London blasts cause chaos on Tube

Wonderful…

I would have quite probably been on the Warren St train normally – I go though there at that time pretty much everyday – but as luck had it I wasn’t today.

I’m not sure if I really want to get on the tube on Thursday’s now, though…

(I will, though.)

Ideas

About a month ago I wrote about what ideas desktop applications could take from the new breed of web apps; recently I’ve been thinking about the reverse: What ideas can web apps take from traditional desktop applications?

With recent advances in web technology, most notably AJAX but also with Xhtml and CSS, making web pages more dynamic has become a whole load easier and hence opened up a path to more user friendly, more powerful and more useful web sites. However, we’re not quite there yet; it’s going to take a bit of transition for both the developers and the users before we settle down on a new breed of sites. Also, most sites will not radically change – most of the sites out there at the moment work pretty well as it is; the current web technology is quite good at providing information-rich web sites (that’s what it was designed for), it’s interactive sites that will see the most change.

Hopefully we will see some standardisation in interface conventions, or at least some form of best practises guidelines. On the mac we have a great document called the Apple Human Interface Guidelines,...

One Week On

I don’t really know what to write at the moment; in fact, since last Thursday it’s been a real struggle to be creative at all, although it’s been coming back in the last few days. That is, of course, one of the main problems with working freelance – you can’t just take a day or two off to take stock…

But the world goes on, nothing really changes, only your specific perception of it does. In the grand scheme of things, 53 people dying in London is almost unnoticeable, but it’s on a small scale that these things matter. For the last week, I’ve been on the tube countless times, and I’ve been though Kings Cross almost everyday which is still closed to most tube lines, and it’s chilling stopping at the station but the doors not opening; how are you not supposed to think about what’s been going on, what’s still going on just 50 meters or so away?

Well, that’s the point of all this, isn’t it? To make people think in a different way, to change the way people live their lives.

Funnily enough, I don’t feel any anger or resentment to...

Sunburst

Right, trying to get back to normal after Thursday…

Terrence Talbot, the other half of the dynamic duo over at Karelia, has posted up a pic of one of my other upcoming Sandvox themes, Sunburst.

Go check it out!

Chaos

And I was trying to go somewhere this morning…

Major Incident on the London Underground

UPDATE: Ok, now there seems to be bombs on busses (at least 1 confirmed, 2 more rumoured)…

UPDATE 2: Ok, so I haven’t seen anymore bus bomb reports (other then the first one), but it’s looking like a coordinated terrorist attack. Lovely…

UPDATE 3: Just to add, as it has now become obviously a lot more serious then first thought (I was on a tube train waiting at the platform at Highbury and Islington (the stop before Kings Cross) and they closed the station citing a “power failure”), my thoughts are with all the people affected – hope everybody’s ok!

Trippy Bubbles

Dan Wood has posted an update on his blog about the progress they’re making on Sandvox , Karelia’s new web development app. In the process, he posts a sneak peak of one of the themes I’m working on for it, Trippy Bubbles.

Thanks Dan!

Can’t wait to see what the app’s like, and also what the other themes are like. Right, back to work on my next theme (Dan does like to crack that wip hard ;-)...

Looking Under Rocks

If you haven’t seen these yet, go check them out now:

Wil Shipley’s WWDC student talk on how to run a mac business (Windows bashing and poetry also included)

&

O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference ‘04, How To Run Your Own Software Business presentation with Oliver Breidenbach, Steve Dekorte, Steve Gehrman, Will Shipley, Brent Simmons, and Dan Wood (via Niall Kennedy’s Weblog as seen on Dan Wood’s Blog )

The main point behind both of these talks (other then being quite amusing) is that it really isn’t that hard to start your own mac software development business – all of the people in these talks started from basically nothing, and have now built up – relatively – successful businesses.

So why aren’t there more of them?

I am currently looking for a job, preferably doing Cocoa development (I find user interface design the most stimulating work you can do, along with creating apps that no-one has tried to do before; Cocoa makes both of these things achievable without lengthy development times and over-complex code), but in this country – England, specifically the London area but it doesn’t seem to make a difference – you...

Welcome to the World of Tomorrow

So, iTunes 4.9 is finally out , and with it comes the mass popularisation of podcasting.

What is podcasting, I hear you (less hip people) ask?

Podcasting is a way of broadcasting an audio file over the Internet, and traditionally uses a subscription model so that you can subscribe (normally using rss) to a podcast, and be notified when it updates.

In other words: it’s radio, for the Internet.

Now, currently podcasting is only just becoming popular; it’s generally not a widely known about technology but several big name companies (the BBC being the best example – they are podcasting a whole load of the radio output) are jumping on the bandwagon. With the incorporation of podcasting into iTunes, it’s going to become a lot more widespread.

Personally, I have yet to really get into podcasting in a major way, and I think that it’s current popularity and hype in the “blog” world is possibly misplaced; a lot of the podcasts out there are very amateur, with exceedingly low production standards, and I get the feeling that a lot of these will die off when the hype dies down.

However, I think that podcasting shows the...

Automatic Wisdom

Flickr is a widely successful online photo sharing site, and it’s success can teach us desktop application developers a few lessons. I’m going to be writing from the point of view of a mac software developer, but most of these points are relevant for anyone doing application development. Also, Flickr is by no means the only site or company that we can learn from, the web development world is moving pretty fast at the moment, so keep your ear to the ground!

So, to the points:

Rapid Updating

According to Cal Henderson (via Tom Coates’ post ‘Cal Henderson on How We Built Flickr…’ ) on a “good day”, Flickr releases a new version every half an hour! Traditional desktop software, in comparison, at best releases new versions maybe once a month for smaller software, going up to years in the case of programs like Microsoft Office.
This goes back to the days where software came on physical media (floppy disks!), and is really a very outdated practice that is way past it’s sell by date. However, there is a lot of mindshare and “automatic wisdom” behind the idea; “It’s what we’ve done...

On Pricing and Site Design

Yesterday WidgetMachine launched, a site from the people behind MacThemes , devoted to Dashboard widgets.

The site is notable for two things; it’s innovative design and also for their decision to charge for widgets – I’ll talk about that first before moving onto the site design.

Now, the widgets that they have up on the site are quite nice aesthetically (they’ve obviously got a whole heap of good designers), but they are still the normal motley crew of dashboard widgets; with cpu monitors, iTunes controllers etc. I don’t quite understand why anyone would want to spend money ($5-$6 at the time of writing) on something, by their very nature, supposed to be small and unobtrusive little gadgets. I certainly wouldn’t spend that sort of money on a normally application of the same functionality.

It’ll be interesting to see if they move forward with their widget selling idea – I really can’t see them selling enough to be profitable, but if they can it will certainly be an eye opener (If people are willing to spend $5 on a widget that – other then looking nice – does nothing that can’t be found elsewhere...