David Emery Online
Spotify says hello to the iPod
You’ve been telling us how much you love discovering, sharing and talking about music in Spotify - and you’ve created well over 200 million playlists to prove it. But you’ve also said you’re listening to a huge amount of music on your iPods, and that getting your Spotify playlists onto them as MP3s has been a serious hassle, forcing you to juggle multiple music players. That’s until now…
Spotify are pretty clearly trying to supplant iTunes as peoples music player of choice which is no bad thing – Apple could really do with some decent competition in this regard, as iTunes has turned into a bloated mess over the years.
I’m intrigued by their download store offering as well, which obviously pares nicely with their new limits on how many times you can listen to tracks if you’re not a premium offering. The focus on bundles of tracks – ostensibly to allow purchasing of playlists – doesn’t seem like a feature that the majority are going to be interested in, however; sounds cool in theory – “people can share playlists and buy them” – but iTunes has had that feature (albeit without the pricing incentives) for years without much success.
It does also strike me that this is a slightly backwards move for Spotify, all in all – dealing with actual files and having your own library was what they originally rebelled against; I guess this is just a reaction to the constraints they’re in, but it certainly dilutes the brand a fair bit.
Visit ➔Kill Screen Profile: Craig Adams
To put it mildly, the hype machine has shown nonstop love for the upcoming Superbrothers production Sword & Sworcery EP. I played through a fair bit of a mature beta, and it is every bit the smartly crafted affair I had hoped for. Sword & Sworcery feels like a game created by one of us. Among those who desperately try to convince non-gamers that Super Meat Boy is a feat of engineering genius, or that Metroid Prime can go toe-to-toe with many of the great narratives of the past 50 years, someone has quit talking and decided to just create something beautiful. Sworcery isn't grandiose-- but the sneaking suspicion is that it may be our "one small step for games" moment.
Sword & Sworcery EP is one of the best games I’ve played in ages; if you’ve got an iPad I urge you to download it if you haven’t already, it’s beautiful.
Also, whilst I’m not sure if Pitchfork should be losing focus from music it’s nice to see a decent bit of writing about games for a change.
Visit ➔The “book” is dead
But more to the point, it would be full of piracy-related terms because that’s what people search for. Google’s suggestions come from actual searches. It’s a mirror onto the world, descriptive not prescriptive. If you don’t like how the world looks in the mirror, don’t blame the mirror.
Interesting post on how the book industry is now facing up to digital piracy, much in the same way the music industry has (or hasn’t, depending on your point of view). It also shows how much work Google needs to do with its search results – not to eliminate copyright infringing results, as that’s practically impossible, but to eliminate the huge amount of fake sites that clog up most results pages.
Visit ➔later.fm
With later.fm you can bookmark music while you browse and listen to it later.
I love the Internet – I’ve been thinking about this very idea for a few weeks now, to the point where I was seriously considering trying to make it myself (which would have never worked) and lo and behold someone’s already made it.
Visit ➔Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation
I don’t need every customer. I’m primarily in the business of selling a product for money.
Such an easy thing to forget – you can’t please all the people all the time, so there’s no point trying.
Focus is the key.
Visit ➔Push Pop Press: Al Gore's Our Choice
Our Choice will change the way we read books. And quite possibly change the world. In this interactive app, Al Gore surveys the causes of global warming and presents groundbreaking insights and solutions already under study and underway that can help stop the unfolding disaster of global warming. Our Choice melds the vice president's narrative with photography, interactive graphics, animations, and more than an hour of engrossing documentary footage. A new, groundbreaking multi-touch interface allows you to experience that content seamlessly. Pick up and explore anything you see in the book; zoom out to the visual table of contents and quickly browse though the chapters; reach in and explore data-rich interactive graphics.
I’m a fan of both eBooks and eMagazines, and consume quite a lot of both on my iPad; this makes all of that look a bit trivial. The potential of tablets as a new medium for information really excites me.
Also, the site has a lovely little design detail – on a desktop it says “Click” and “Rollover”; on the iPad it’s the same design but it says “Tap” instead.
Visit ➔Photosmith, the Lightroom iPad companion, is now available
We’ve had the pleasure of using Photosmith during its beta period and it has already joined our list of must-have photography apps for Apple’s tablet. If you use Lightroom and own an iPad, we strongly recommend checking out Photosmith.
I do hope Apple have something similar up their sleeve for Aperture and the iPad (and I’d be pretty happy if that involved iPhoto for the iPad at the same time…).
Visit ➔I Just Facebook Like You
Brands dramatically overweight the value of the ‘likes’ their campaigns accrue and treat it as pure social signal. And they make spending decisions based on these unformed notions of community, commitment, sociality. They play for the wrong endgames (high like counts, ‘virality’, shares) without architecting deeper, long-lasting experiences that break out of stream thinking.
Facebook “Likes” are a pretty weird thing now they’ve been turned over to marketeers, aren’t they? Speaking from the position of a marketeer, of course.
In the space of a year they’ve managed to completely own and redefine the meaning of the word “like”.
Visit ➔