David Emery OnlineScrobbling Timelines
Graphs are clearly Laurie’s raison d‘être, so it didn’t take me long to figure out that a great way of thanking him would be to write some code that does something we’ve been working towards for some time at Last.fm: generating personalized, real-time scrobbling history graphs.
I love graphs, me. Last.fm + graphs is hence a match made in heaven.
I know a lot of people use Last.fm for things like the recommended radio, forums and all that jazz but I use it solely for scrobbling and storing that data – what I played, when and how often. In fact, the more ways I could replicate the idea of scrobbling across other media the better; I’d love to scrobble watching films and TV (which technically could be done by Sky if they wanted), reading books and magazines (maybe on the iPad?) and all sorts of other things; in fact, it’s what interested me in Foursquare, which is pretty much scrobbling of location.
My scrobble graph can be found here.
Visit ➔iPad’s Killer App: It Looks A Bit Like A Magazine
But that won’t dishearten newspaper and magazine publishers. Because, for all the bluster about iPad “saving media”, their real iPad salvation is this: they can present their editions in much the same old dead-tree format they did before that pesky HTML came along.
“I believe the iPad will be about sitting in front of the TV whilst watching TV, browsing a ‘magazine’,” McCaffrey - whose 2ergo made the apps for The Guardian, Fox News, Arsenal FC and others - told me in an interview. “It will switch on in a second, you’ll be straight in to your content - it will be almost exactly like a magazine that you pick up from the coffee table.”
Yep, brilliant – that’s exactly what we need: glorified PDFs outputted by InDesign.
Bound to work out just fine that strategy. Just fine.
Visit ➔Wired for the iPad to Launch by Summer
Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson announced at the TED conference on Friday that the publication would be releasing its content for the iPad by summer.
[...]
“I’m from the media world,” Anderson told the audience “and as you may have heard, we have lots of questions about our future. The good news I think we found part of the answer…. We think this is a game changer.”
Back last month in the dark ages before the iPad had been unleashed upon the world I wrote a little article about what the possibilities the forthcoming tablet could hold, with a particular focus on eMagazines (or whatever we’re supposed to call them). The conclusion I got to (eventually) was that they just don’t really make any sense, so I was pretty eager to see what Apple was going to offer in that regard and how they made it make sense.
It turns out, of course, that they didn’t.
We got an eBook store – which we already know make sense – and a demo of a NY Times app (that did look lovely) but no proper official Apple solution; and you know if Apple thought it made sense, we would have got one. So, this Wired iPad app is undoubtedly the first announcement of many (there’s already quite a few for the iPhone, although none featuring in the Apps charts) but I’m not betting against Apple on this one…
Visit ➔Román Cortés and Ajaxian make up with amazing CSS demos
These effects are CSS level 1 and 2.1 only. There is no javascript, css3 or whatever, just html and css.
They are all based on the CSS 2D displacement map technique that Román Cortés discovered when he created the infamous CSS Coke Can effect.
The prism effect in particular is stunning – it’s nice to see that there’s still room for old school CSS hackery (although I can’t help but think you could do it way more easily using CSS3).
Visit ➔Version 9
Regular readers will know that I have a – how shall I put it? – tendency to redesign this site at the drop of a hat. So much so that the assorted different versions got featured in a presentation at SXSW last year.
So, with that in mind welcome to version 9 of de-online.co.uk!
It’s actually been over a year since the last version was launched, and although I did tweak that a little as the year progressed that’s the largest amount of time between different version since I launched this little corner of the internet. This version, it has to be said, is not a huge departure from the previous one and carries a few of the themes developed there forward; the large photo headers, the colour red for links and highlights and a similar main typeface choice.
Last time round that typeface was Trade Gothic, with Helvetica used for body text, but that involved using Sifr (flash-based text replacement) which I was never happy with. This time round of embraced the wonders of @fontface and used two freely available fonts in the form of League Gothic for headings, and Steinem for body text, both of which...
Read more ➔Zoom With Your Feet
“3 songs, no flash.”
It’s the standard – and also mildly disappointing – phrase you hear more times then not when you pickup your photopass before a gig. I ‘get’ why it’s done – I know if I was a band I’d want fans in front of me rather then photographers, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating. If you don’t know the venue there’s always that hope that maybe they don’t have a strict policy, although chances are that if they don’t have limits then they probably don’t have a photo pit either which brings its own set of challenges (mostly surrounding the fact that you’re pretty much rooted to the spot).
I know, I know – never happy, always complaining.
The lack of flash is normally ok – I’ll use flash if I can, but only to boost up the light that’s there already; pretty much all of my favourite photos I’ve taken are made interesting by the stage lights. That being said, every now and then you come across a gig where the lighting guy decides not to put the front lights on and you’re pretty much screwed (see Julian Casablancas at the Forum where I only...
Read more ➔SublimeVideo HTML5 Video Player
HTML5 video goodness: no browser plugin, no Flash dependencies
I know a lot of people have linked to this already, but just in case you haven’t seen it yet this is well worth checking out. Obviously HTML5 video is not ready for prime time yet – Ogg is not a video format I’m going to encode in, so hence it only really works in Safari+Chrome – but when it is it’s good to know that not only will video playback be better then it currently is in flash, the user experience (read: slickness) will be as well.
Visit ➔MusicDNA Wants to Compete with Apple's iTunes LP Format - But Will Anybody Care?
MusicDNA, a new file format that looks a lot like Apple's iTunes LP format, wants to bring liner notes to the 21st century. MusicDNA is a new rich-media extension for digital music files that enriches songs and albums with additional data like lyrics,
I’m not super into the idea of these new ‘rich-media’ music formats – does anyone really want them? – but what I really don’t understand about either this or the rival CMX is where the hell people are supposed to buy these things from?
You’re certainly not going to be able to buy these things from iTunes (as they already have a rich-media format and have implemented it in the form of iTunes LP) and is it worth anybody’s time to make one of these things if you can’t sell them on the biggest music store?
Visit ➔Thesixtyone Unveils a Gorgeous Redesign, Users Predictably Revolt
Music discovery site thesixtyone unveiled a radical—and gorgeous—redesign a couple days ago. The redesign presents a single, lush full-screen photograph as each song plays, while smaller snapshots fade in and out screensaver-style. The controls are
Thesixtyone redesign certainly looks nice – obviously I’m a big fan of the full window photo thing (in fact my 2009 Top 20 was going to look just like that but I ran out of time). However, I agree with the ‘revolting’ users – it’s practically impossible to use now, and it feels like lots of functionality has been lost (I don’t know if it has or not, but it’s impossible to find things that used to be there).
Pretty and experimental is all well and good, but it needs to be useable too – see the way Hype Machine does it; the main site is super useable, but then they go and do cool, different things for their 2009 Zeitgeist alongside it.
Design and usability can be done at the same time – it’s not one or the other.
Visit ➔Apple’s Secret Cloud Strategy And Why Lala Is Critical
An upcoming major revision of iTunes will copy each user’s catalog to the net making it available from any browser or net connected ipod/touch/tablet. The Lala upload technology will be bundled into a future iTunes upgrade which will automatically be
I’d love this to be true, and I think it will be at some point in the near future. There’s no way though that Apple won’t charge for it, and probably charge a little bit too much, as is their wont. Would make sense as a killer feature to add to MobileMe (it would certainly make me signup).
Visit ➔