David Emery Online

Antacid Tablet

[…] It will most likely be based on web technologies, much like the iTunes LP format. Best case (but also the least likely), it’ll be a slightly incompatible extension of the ePub standard. Worst case (and most likely), it’ll be an entirely new format. Either way, like iTunes LP, the format will be publicly documented and there’ll be an SDK available to all interested parties…eventually.

I do hope that the (if it happens) format Apple uses for ebooks and emagazines (yuck – can’t think of what else to call them though) is HTML based. It does beg the question though of what the difference between a emagazine and a website is though – why would anyone buy one? I’m interested to see what Apple’s answer to that one is…

Going Deaf

Hiring for a Web Developer

We are looking for a talented and enthusiastic designer/developer to join our in-house web development team, to design, code and build artist, label and promotional web sites.

Required skills:

• Strong Semantic HTML
• Strong CSS
• Great design skills

At work we’re hiring for a web developer / designer (front end stuff, basically). So, if you’re interested (or someone you know is) in working with artists like Radiohead, The Strokes, The National, Sonic Youth and many, many more drop me a line.

Music Hackday Boston

Hack-wise I was most impressed by Dan Kantor’s playdarTunes. An iTunes like web-interface that you populate by upload your iTunes library file and then play tracks through Playdar (as it’s all local content, in theory). It’s similar in principle to the Playlick player (James introduced me to Dan, in fact) and I can’t help but get excited about this idea of portable music collections. Where not only is the audio portable, but the library itself could come from different sources and is sharable. What I really want is a slick web-based iTunes which lets me select which of my libraries (or friends libraries) I want to browse and listen to.

That’s what I’d like as well – I guess it’s a similar sort of thing to what Spotify is doing, just more so. Could someone make it please? Ta…

Content Design

Apple Strikes Deal to Buy the Music Start-Up Lala

In the most recent sign that Apple is looking at alternative ways for people to store and play their digital music, the company has agreed to buy Lala, a four-year-old start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif., a person with knowledge of the deal said Friday.

Everyone had assumed for a while that Apple was going to get into streaming music at some point, but this is the first actual sign it might be happening.

I wonder if Lala is to their forthcoming streaming product as SoundJam was to iTunes back in the day?

Efterklang - Modern Drift

For some reason I thought Efterklang sounded completely different then this – no idea why. Luckily though they do sound like this, where ‘this’ is something really quite special:

My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement

But there’s another possibility – one I don’t necessarily subscribe to, but one that could be avoided entirely by humoring pests like me. There’s a theory that labels and publishers deliberately avoid creating the transparent accounting systems today’s technology enables. Because accurately accounting to my silly little band would mean accurately accounting to the less silly bands that are recouped, and paying them more money as a result.

I’d chalk it down to sheer volume of numbers – number of digital services x number of new digital services every month x number of artists x number of releases. Maybe with a dab of evil and a dash of laziness on the side, of course.

Well worth a read though if you have even a vague interest in how artists actually get paid (or not, in reality) by record labels.

Socialite - All your social networks in one application

Socialite is a beautiful Mac OS X application, designed to make it easy to stay in touch with the social networks and services that matter to you. From news on Digg, photos on Flickr, statuses and photos on Facebook and Twitter updates, to full Google Reader RSS syncing, Socialite keeps all your social networks in one convenient place.

Socialite – which used to be called EventBox – is easily the best Mac twitter client, with a nice Mac-like UI and support for all the bells and whistles like multiple accounts, retweet support, lists, searches etc. If that wasn’t enough though, it also supports Facebook, Flickr, RSS and Google Reader, all going into one combined feed so you can stay up-to-date with everything.

It’s a must have app – I have 5 apps I always have running on every Mac I use: Mail, Adium, Safari, Quicksilver and Socialite.

(Full disclosure – back in the day, Eventbox was kind-of my idea)

Dear Taylor Swift

But I’m sad that your web site lets some of your most important fans — those who have special needs — down, in ways that you might not realise. Not that I blame you, you’re an artist, not a web designer or developer.

To be fair, yours isn’t the only country artist site that is inaccessible to people with disabilities. Both Shania Twain’s and Dolly Parton’s also make it either very difficult or impossible for some people to access their content. So I would like to show you how your site could be improved in small ways that would make a huge difference to a lot of people, with or without disabilities.

Always good to be reminded about these things; it amazes me, though, that people are still making nasty all-flash sites like this…