David Emery Online

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.

Love songs

Every now and then an album sneaks up on you when you really weren’t expecting it, certainly in the business I work in at least where albums (meticulously crafted outpourings of someones blood and sweat that they are) fly past, barely even making a mark. The last time that happened for me was the Deerhunter record, which I flat out ignored to start with but ended up being my second favourite of last year.

The same path has been walked with Childish Prodigy by Kurt Vile. For whatever reason when it first came to my attention I just totally disregarded it. On further reflection I’m not really sure why; probably – and it so often is this straight forward – due to the name, which while not really conjuring up anything too specific musically it does seem to foreshadow music I wouldn’t like. It sounds so overly contrived whereas I’m told it’s actually his real name, although I scarcely believe it.

If you look at his anaemic Wikipedia page you’ll see people like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty mentioned, which while I know they’re supposed to be amazing just aren’t my cup of tea, and the comparisons doesn’t really do...

Whole New Way - The Horrors

Not quite on probably-best-album-of-the-year-or-at-least-close-to-the-top ‘Primary Colours’, and you can sort-of see why – not because it’s not good, because it is (very), but because it just wouldn’t fit:

Introducing Google Chrome Frame

Recent JavaScript performance improvements and the emergence of HTML5 have enabled web applications to do things that could previously only be done by desktop software. One challenge developers face in using these new technologies is that they are not yet supported by Internet Explorer. Developers can’t afford to ignore IE — most people use some version of IE — so they end up spending lots of time implementing work-arounds or limiting the functionality of their apps.

With Google Chrome Frame, developers can now take advantage of the latest open web technologies, even in Internet Explorer. From a faster Javascript engine, to support for current web technologies like HTML5’s offline capabilities and <canvas>, to modern CSS/Layout handling, Google Chrome Frame enables these features within IE with no additional coding or testing for different browser versions.

I’m really torn on how I feel about this; on the one hand, more people using WebKit is undoubtedly a good thing. On the other, embedding a browser inside another browser just feels plain wrong on a bunch of levels (what about things like memory usage, for example?) and seems like a pretty extreme way of enabling better HTML5/CCS3/JS support in IE.

Also, does it really help that much? I can’t help but think that if someone is persuaded enough to download plugin (and hence has the Administer rights to do so) then it would be better to persuade them to download a different browser instead…

Thin Text in Safari with Snow Leopard

Safari has a not-so-lovely way of bulking up text using sub-pixel rendering. On previous versions of Safari, this was fixed with a text-shadow declaration, but since Snow Leopard that method no longer works. Fortunately, I’ve found an alternative.

Very useful – my only thought is that I wonder how this affects Safari on pre-SL and on Windows.