David Emery OnlineFoals - 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 ➔The Archives Update
Don’t worry RSS readers, I haven’t redesigned again – you can rest easy. However, my css-tourettes has finally paid some dividends.
I’m linking to myself here, to point out that I’ve updated my archives post which has all the assorted different designs this blog has had over the years. It’s interesting how badly the blog format deals with updated content like this, and also with posts that have a more long term appeal (rather then the slightly ephemeral, time specific nature mosts posts have) – not really sure what to do about it though, so linking to myself will have to suffice.
Eagle eyed readers will also spot that not only have I put version 9 of this blog in the archive, but version 9b as well – I couldn’t resist doing some tweaks to it, even though it hadn’t been up for barely two weeks…
Visit ➔
Subscriber Information and Revenue Sharing Seen as Hurdles to iPad Newspaper and Magazine Deals
Financial Times reports that talks between Apple and a number of newspaper and magazine publishers have encountered several hurdles that have slowed the deal-making process as the periodicals publishing industry attempts to understand how the move to digital distribution will affect its business.
One of the major concerns publishers are reportedly having pertains to Apple's policy of sharing only limited customer information with its content partners. As the report notes, publishers have long mined data on their subscribers in order to develop marketing efforts and evolve the focus of their publications over time, but Apple's reluctance to share that information is reportedly making publishers uneasy. […] Another concern for newspaper and magazine publishers is Apple's proposed revenue sharing arrangement, which involves Apple taking a 30% share of revenue for handling distribution.
Read: greed and cluelessness seen as hurdles to newspapers and magazines continuing to do business.
Visit ➔CSS Gradients For All Web Browsers, Without Using Images
The good news is that there is web browser support for CSS gradients in Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer (Opera will most likely add it soon too). The bad news is that, for a couple of reasons, the implementation in each web browser is different from the other.
I didn’t realise there was an IE filter for doing gradients as well – handy! I imagine there’s a performance hit though…
Visit ➔