David Emery OnlineAmbilight for video tag
At first it looks like an average video player, the kind that loads standard HTML5 video. As the video plays, you very quickly notice what’s happening at the edges. The plugin automatically grabs the average colour in each area, and spreads it across the bounds of the video.
Incredibly cool – makes me very excited about what the possibilities are for doing crazy things in HTML and JS with video.
Visit ➔MTV channel idents
MTV International (ie MTV in every country bar the US) rolled out a new identity and idents created by MTV's world design studio in Milan in collaboration with Universal Everything last year […] More recently (and potentially confusingly) we reported that MTV (in the US) has tweaked the logo in a separate (and for now localised) rebrand - although that logo tweak WILL impact in MTV International (non US) territories by the end of next year. Now MTV International has added to last year's rebranding exercise by rolling out brand new idents designed specifically for its separate, genre-based channels
Nice ‘brand harmonisation’ you’ve got going on there MTV.
I can’t help but feel like this raft of changes-for-changes-sake – most notably, from my point of view, the rebrand of MTV2 to the vomit-inducing MTV Rocks – is a last ditch attempt to become relevant again when it comes to music videos. It’s not going to work though; music video has found its true home on the internet, and it’s not going to be on TV in any meaningful way for much longer…
Visit ➔Steve Lamacq on 6music
The cultural hole it would leave if scrapped, would have terrible repercussions for everyone from small promoters to indie labels to bands and to music fans of all ages. We’d be denying people the chance to hear music which could – even in just a few cases – alter their life, as listening to John Peel changed mine.
I’ve held back from writing about the proposed closure of BBC 6music as I don’t think I have anything to add to the debate that hasn’t already been said, and by better writers to boot.
Steve hits the nail on the head here, of course. None of the arguments hold any weight when examined with any thoroughness; it’s just politics, plain and simple.
Visit ➔Foals - Spanish Sahara
Enter your email to receive an exclusive remix of 'Spanish Sahara'
Lovely new song from Foals – I’m not quite sure though why they’re only giving away a remix of it; I’m a fan of Foals, not whoever has screwed with a song I don’t really even know yet…
Visit ➔Condé Nast reveals initial list of iPad magazines
Condé Nast's editorial director, Thomas Wallace, noted that there's an experimental aspect to releasing these publications for the iPad. These titles will be used to test pricing and advertising strategies. It won't be easy, as distribution will be handled via iTunes, and Apple doesn't share reader data.
Lets hit this ‘ooh Apple doesn’t share reader data, how will we cope’ thing on the head now, before it gets out of hand shall we? Firstly, you don’t get reader data from non-subscription copies of physical magazines anyway which – if they follow the model they’re already pursuing with the GQ iPhone apps which have an app-per-issue – is a more accurate comparison then looking at subscriber copies.
Secondly – and more importantly – Apple isn’t limiting this in any way. If they want to get reader data, just put a step in on first launch to get reader data; they’re writing the app, so they can do anything they want. If we were talking about an Apple created eMagazine format with specific restrictions that would be a different story, but we’re not; we’re talking about the App Store, which actually lets you do pretty much anything you like.
Visit ➔Continuous publishing through Live Editions
One of the biggest challenges of technical publishing is that sinking feeling you get a few moments, days, weeks, or months after you first see a book in print: it's obsolete. No matter how much hard work you put into a book, you can only do so much future-proofing. Sometimes obsolescence comes slowly, but often, especially for popular topics, books have a depressingly short shelf life. Readers want to be able to use the latest and greatest, and blame books quickly when something no longer works.
What if there was some way, maybe via a computer for example, to publish something digitally and then keep updating and editing it afterwards?
Would be pretty clever, that.
Visit ➔How Software Engineers and Designers Can Increase Their Focus
There’s a really simple tip almost everybody can use to increase productivity tremendously. Not only is the tip free, it might even make you a bit of money. *And* it’ll make you smarter. It’s really easy, there’s only one step involved: Sell your TVs.
I don’t get how anyone can fail to see that TV is one of the most important source of culture and knowledge we have.
Might as well be saying ‘sell all your books’ or ‘don’t listen to music’.
Visit ➔CSS transitions in Gecko
Current Firefox nightlies have support for the bleeding-edge CSS transitions specification. […] CSS transitions make it easy to smoothly animate changes to CSS styles, instead of changes taking effect instantly.
Great news! I don’t think there’s a site I’ve done in the last year that doesn’t feature some CSS transitions – which up till now have been Webkit only. I’m less thrilled though about having to add -moz duplicates for all of them though; not great having to write all this fancy new CSS3 4 times over (Webkit, Gecko, Opera and without prefix just in case).
Thinking For A Living
We took our website and turned it sideways. Why? Well, the site is for reading on screen, and I don’t know about you, but our screens are wider than they are tall. Putting text in columns makes it easier to read by providing a proper line length too. My eyes feel relieved already.
Well this is lovely isn’t it?
Love the horizontal, column-based layout – I tried to do this a few years ago with the To My Boy site (sadly offline now) but this is far nicer.
Visit ➔