David Emery OnlineWhy the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive
It’s a news ticker limited to one-word items, lacking any context, broadcasting mostly topics that I don’t understand, recognize, or care about. It’s nonsensical. At worst, it can offend. At best, it will confuse.
Personally I don’t mind the Quick Bar as a way of surfacing trends, but that’s only because it’s my job to be aware of these things; you should be able to turn it off.
The reason why you can’t turn it off though is the key problem here – it doubles up as Twitter’s stab at monetisation. As Marco mentions, advertising is not the problem here, it’s the implementation in the iPhone client but I think that misses the bigger issue: ‘Promoted Trends’ has got to be one of the worst forms of advertising you could come up with.
From an advertisers point of view you get a tiny amount of characters to get your message across, which is never going to be effective (have you ever clicked on a promoted trend? I haven’t.), with no targeting (when they could be doing very targeted ads as they know what you’re interested in by what you follow and tweet).
Come on Twitter; just have done with it and do in-stream ads and let me pay to be able to switch them off. Simple, effective and not dickish.
Visit ➔Rebecca Black Means The (Internet) Fame Game Has Changed
Earlier today I had lunch with a musician friend who was lamenting the trouble her band was having booking shows in San Francisco. When I asked her how she planned on getting the word out she said, “Get a publicist, or have a video go viral.”
I love the way it’s just ‘have a video that goes viral’ as if that’s something you can just ‘do’. The only thing you can control is whether the video – or your music, for that matter – is any good, so how about focusing on that?
Visit ➔Piracy doesn't fund the mob or terrorists
A scholarly report funded by the Canadian government and the Ford Foundation investigates the alleged link between copyright infringement and terrorism and finds none. Basically, counterfeiters can't compete with free, and so there's no money in it.
I imagine that the counterfeit market is far more price sensitive then the legitimate market.
Visit ➔Apple working on magazine app template for developers?
According to Anthony Morganti Apple has been so inspired and excited by the latest stream of iPad-optimized magazine applications that they are now working on a magazine-app template for use by developers in Xcode.
Seems like a no brainer to me – they can’t be too happy with Adobe being the mina player in this market. I wouldn’t be too surprised if they come up with a consumer aimed offering for this as well, to sit alongside iMovie, Pages et al.
Visit ➔Saturn fly-by video
There is no 3-D CGI involved in this amazing Saturn fly-by video...it's made from thousands of hi-res photographs taken by the Cassini orbiter.
I scarcely believe this is real:
Visit ➔Introducing Solo
Introducing Solo, the project management tool for the modern freelancer. We're designers and we've loved making Solo. We think that if you try it you'll love it too.
This looks beautiful – I wish that 1) I had a use for it and 2) all web apps looked like this.
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iPhoto for iOS
So, will we see the rest of the iLife suite on iOS? It’s worth mentioning, first of all, that the whole idea of a “suite of apps” may be falling off Apple’s radar very quickly. High-volume, wide-market, affordable and convenient apps make bundles financially unnecessary. Still, we know - and Apple knows - what the idea of iLife is and has been: apps to organize, enhance, and share your digital life.
iPhoto seems like the obvious next step for iOS, but personally I’d love them to go the whole hog and just skip straight to Aperture; considering GarageBand runs better on my iPad 1 then on my 3 year old MacBook Pro I can see it working on an iPad 2.
Visit ➔Web Developers Will Now Be Able To Tap Into the Power of Rdio
If you’re a developer interested in integrating music with a social bent into your web apps, start your engines: Super-social music subscription service Rdio is opening its Rdio.com API and affiliate program to developers.
Seems very nifty – certainly more expansive then Spotify’s API. Although, with Rdio’s lack of a free, ad-supported option a little bit less interesting as well (do you really want your user to have to have a $4.99/m account to be able to use your app?).
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