David Emery OnlineThe 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…
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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 ➔Scrobbling 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.
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“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).
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