David Emery Online

The New Grooveshark: Faster, Prettier And Still Phenomenal

I’ve always considered the Grooveshark web app’s UI to be quite amazing, so I was wary when I was granted preview access to the service’s new look, which the startup is presenting publicly for the first time today (at 12 AM EST). Fortunately, they somehow managed to make it even more awesome than it already was, and the makeover was more than a new lick of paint as it also included a number of performance tweaks to make it run smoother.

You know what? The new version of Grooveshark is pretty slick; it looks very nice. However, while I was sitting through the (inevitable) loading screen and spinning beachball cursor that a flash-based app brings I was wondering: are there any popular all flash sites? Sure, you get plenty of places who use it as the way of delivering content (YouTube, MySpace etc etc) but I can’t think of any that are solely flash-based. Not one…

VW launches Real Racing GTI on iPhone

[…] Volkswagen got smart and instead partnered with developer Firemint, which already has a well received racing game for sale in the App Store called Real Racing. Together, the two companies have put out Real Racing GTI, a free version of the $6.99 app that exclusively features the new 2010 Volkswagen GTI.

Very nice free iPhone game there from VW, and a smart way of spending those marketing dollars…

iTunesLP.net

At this moment these iTunes LPs are available for a select list of new releases on the iTunes store. However we think it would be nice to have many older, out-of-print, obscure albums or albums on indie-labels to get the same experience; and with that in mind we started working on finding out exactly how this new format works, in order to share our results with the community.

I thought about doing this, but low and behold someone has beaten me to it (and done a much better job, of course). Thanks internet! The iTunes LP format is quite intriguing really – we’ve now got a extremely modern web renderer built into the most popular music software, and they can interact together nicely (using a dab of Javascript) – there’s got to be some interesting things you can do with that…

Spotify’s new music purchasing features

From today, every track on Spotify that’s also in 7digital’s catalogue will have a clear Buy button next to the track name (see pic above – click to make it larger). Albums will also have a Buy Album button below the cover artwork. […] clicking on the new Buy buttons doesn’t take you to a website any more: it pops up a window within the Spotify application itself.

This instantly makes Spotify that much more interesting – it’s already the second most prominent music playing software after iTunes, and now it’s got its very own store. I wonder, though, whether the people that use Spotify are that interested in buying music through it (really, why would you bother?).

Firefox Implements Webkit's CSS Transitions

The Webkit team has proposed a CSS extension for transitions between property values. It would be nice to implement this in Mozilla as well.

This is great; sometime in the near future – hopefully this will be in Firefox 3.6 – we’ll have CSS-based animated transitions in 3 major browsers (Safari, Chrome and Firefox). That’ll remove 90% of my jQuery usage in one fell swoop…

the internet (by LCD Soundsystem)

Anyway, i’m making a record, as previously blathered about, and this means that my horrible, useless website is getting redone by my friend sonya. i mean, it sucks, which was my choice. i was like “can this look more horrible?” i wish i was kidding, but i happen to like crap. i just do. but she’s promised to work with me to make sure it’s still unwieldy and awkward, which is good preparation for everything else lcdish, and i promise to be less grumpy about things actually being “useful”. it’s just that things that are too “useful”… well, i don’t entirely trust them. i kind of like useless things. for instance—and this is a pretty facile and simplified metaphor here—art is useless, and nazis made lots of useful things. i like dumb meandering things that make me happy and confused, and don’t particularly like “effective marketing tools designed for maximum accurate data capture” blah blah blah. it all sounds so sad and functional. i don’t like the idea of people sitting in a room talking about the best way to word things to get the right reaction from a base of “users” etc. i don’t like thinking that those people used to love to do something, or wanted to be something, and would [ed: I assume he means wound] up measuring the best way to manipulate other people. i honestly don’t judge them, but i feel weird, and sort of sad—not FOR them, in a pitying way, as i have no idea how they fell, for fuck’s sake, and i’m a ridiculous person by the measure of a pretty deep cut of the population—but ABOUT them.

Emphasis mine – of course, you can make things useful and useless all at the same time (just in different ways), although it’s easy sometimes to focus on the useful; start with the science, but don’t forget the art.

Fun with Quartz Composer in Snow Leopard and the BBC Radio Schedule

I think the easiest way to understand it, is it lets you plug things into other things to produce very cool things, without the need to write a single line of code. […] With this new functionality as well as other new patches, I have created a composition that rolls through the BBC’s National Radio networks and displays who is currently on air, as well as downloading and displaying the network logo and a pretty image for that show.

Very nifty – I had totally forgotten about Quartz Composer and its powerful simplicity in making very pretty data mashups.

Vampire Weekend - Horchata

Yesterday we released the first track from the new Vampire Weekend album, and jolly good it is too:

I’m superhappy (that’s a word, right?) with the way the download page turned out; it just looks right – hopefully you think so too. As per normal (for me, seemingly) it’s using all kinds of javascript-based magic to scale everything to your browser window size, including automatically spreading out the different lines of text to fit the height correctly. Also, look out for the lyrics booklet we bundled with the download as well – as close as I’ll probably get to designing a record sleeve…

LCD Soundsystem Twitter

[…] warning: this twitter thing will hardly be filled with real insights. it’ll be crap.

facebook will be slightly less crap. myspace will be mostly ignored crap. website will be more “designed” crap. but i think record: good.

Two things: 1) I’m getting very excited by the prospect of a new LCD record and 2) this is a pretty nice summation of the different roles twitter/facebook/myspace/websites play in music…

Spotify Goes Offline

Beginning later today, Spotify Premium subscribers will be able to select their playlists and set them to be ‘Available offline’. Those playlists will then be synced to the computer so you can listen to your favorite tunes even if your internet connection goes down or if you’re at summer house with no connection at all.

I don’t think adding an offline mode to the Spotify desktop app is that interesting really (when these days don’t you have a internet connection on your computer?), but what is interesting about this story is it highlights Spotify’s update model. Unlike most desktop apps, Spotify gets updates just like a web app – every now and then when you launch it you’ll notice new features pop up.

Spotify is probably the first true hybrid web/desktop application.