David Emery Online

Hi there, I’m David. This is my website. I work in music for Apple. You can find out a bit more about me here. On occasion I’ve been known to write a thing or two. Please drop me a line and say hello. Views mine not my employers.

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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.

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Zune over

Loop Insight notes a Business Insider report that the Zune is done.

I never did see one in real life.

Me neither.

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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:

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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.

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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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Twitter Drops The Ecosystem Hammer: Don’t Try To Compete With Us On Clients

Specifically, Platform lead Ryan Sarver has a fairly lengthy outline of Twitter’s line of thinking with regard to third-party clients and services. And while there’s a little bit of dancing around the topic at first, it quickly gets very clear: third-parties shouldn’t be creating straight-up Twitter clients any further.

There’s no doubt this is a very disappointing move from Twitter, considering you can’t find a company that has its success more routed in external developers and APIs. Presumably this is linked to the fact that Twitter has been promising advertising (in the form of promoted tweets and trends) in 3rd party clients to its advertisers to launch in Q2 2011; to be able to guarantee it they have to have tight control over those clients, and this is the start of that.

This seems like a major misstep; surely they can generate enough revenue from the mainstream users using the official clients (including twitter.com) not to have to resort to this?

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It Started With A Click: How to Spawn A Viral Hit

This think tank will inform and inspire those looking to understand how to make music go viral over social media. Lifting the lid and debunking dogma about how to create a viral hit, this illustrated session will combine panel-led debate with open round table discussion providing all with pointers, next step suggestions and an eye on how music will broken in the future.

Come and hear me witter on in person about all this music marketing malarky on Thursday. Hopefully I will have figured out by then how on earth you do make a “viral” hit…

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Island Def Jam Partners With The Echo Nest To Create Opportunities For Developers

In what the companies are calling the first-ever alliance between a major label and the independent app developer community, Island Def Jam and The Echo Nest are partnering to make the label’s catalog available to developers who employ The Echo Nest’s API. [...] As part of this agreement, the label is rendered the publisher of the app, giving it control over distribution and making it privy to a portion of the revenue (the rest goes to the dev and The Echo Nest). In turn, IDJ will market the app and pay music publishers when need be.

Amazing work here – use Island Def Jam’s API and they effectively own your app. I can’t see any serious developer being interested in this.

The idea of being able to access label data through an API is an interesting one – we’re actually mid way through developing one ourself – but I wonder how interesting it is when it’s on a label by label basis; most of the time you’re going to want a much larger range of content I would have thought.

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