David Emery Online

Rock Band to Get its Own Music Marketplace

Rock Band Network, currently in closed beta, should launch to the public in August (with in-game sales later in the year), and allow for any wanne-be or tried-and-true beat master, music mixer, or soulful singer to add their music to the Rock Band catalogue for user purchase and game play.

It’s easy to forget, but the Rock Band and Guitar Hero track stores do a staggering amount of business so it’s great that they’re opening up. Also very useful, considering they may become chart eligible soon.

But of course I would say that

It had been a while since the last gig I went to – which was the sublime Pixies gig almost a month ago – so it was nice to get back into the swing of things and head down to the ICA to see the awesome pairing of St Vincent and Blue Roses.

Every now and then I feel it’s probably worth bringing up, in the interests of full disclosure, my inherent biases when it comes to this sort of thing. Both St Vincent and Blue Roses are on labels that I work for, and not only that but I project managed the building of their websites so obviously I have a vested interest and probably can’t be trusted in the slightest to give a unbiased opinion.

Having said that, we probably have about 100+ acts on our active roster and you don’t see me talking about all of them on here, so make of that what you will. While I like to think that I only write about things I genuinely like what I will readily admit is that I do get exposed to a hell of a lot of music that I wouldn’t normally listen to,...

Location Now Built-In To Google Maps — In Chrome And Firefox

If you are using either Google Chrome 2.0+ or Mozilla FireFox 3.5+, you’ll now notice a little dot in the upper left-hand corner of Maps, just above the Street View guy. If you click that dot, Google Maps will show you your location on the map. It does this using the W3C Geolocation API standard

Very nifty – it works exactly like the location finder on the iPhone Google Maps app, and seemed to find me pretty accurately. Here’s hoping that it gets adopted in Safari fairly sharpish…

Prowl

Prowl is a Growl client for the iPhone. Notifications from your Mac can be sent to your iPhone over push, with a full range of customization and grace you expect.

This is pretty darn cool – an easy solution for twitter direct message notifications on your phone (if your client supports it) amongst many, many other things. It also has a perl script for passing it direct notifications without using Growl, which means you can do server side notifications to your phone which is superawesome. Very tempted to whip up a Textpattern plugin to do comment notifications…

From Moby

How’s it going?
The album just came out and it would be #1 euro charts if not for michael jackson re-releases.
So that’s good.
But here’s something funny: the best selling itunes track is ’shot in the back of the head’.
Why is that funny?
Because its the track we’ve been giving away for free for the last 2 months and that we’re still givng away for free.
Odd.
How are you?
Moby

We’ve had many similar experiences – giving away a track can lead to higher sales; for example, at exactly the same time we were giving away The Horrors ‘Sea Within A Sea’ from their website we were seeing great sales of the track on iTunes (and it’s still the second most popular track from the album on there, even though we’re still giving it away).

The State of the Web

Back a week or so ago at the lovely @media conference 3 main themes seemed to emerge, both from the presentations themselves and the hallway chatter:

Process, Font Embedding & HTML5

The focus on process I think is natural for an industry that’s reached a pretty high level of maturity. In fact, I think this level of maturity has reached out and touched every level of the conference – no longer are we having to evangelise new working practises (‘no tables for layout’ and the like) or share new layout techniques. We’re there. We’re done with the obvious.

Of course, there’s a highly debatable definition of ‘we’ in there – the battles, such that they are, are still to be fought but it certainly feels like the industry as a whole has moved on. Hence, the focus on ‘process’ and making sure that we’re doing what we do in the best way possible.

Hence also all the talk about font embedding and HTML5 – the new ‘exciting’ stuff. Font embedding right now though seems to be a potentially great tool that’s mired in legal and political issues. The short version: font foundries as yet don’t seem to be massively interested in sorting out...

Nearest Tube Augmented Reality App for iPhone 3GS

It looks a bit shaky, but as a working proof of concept it’s startling – we are living in the future (how exciting!):

Social Media Icons

A set of standardised icons for popular social networking services and tools.

Having had to make a couple of these only a week ago this is very timely – lovely work and very useful…

Modernizr

Modernizr is a small and simple JavaScript library that helps you take advantage of emerging web technologies (CSS3, HTML 5) while still maintaining a fine level of control over older browsers that may not yet support these new technologies.

How handy – I’m using assorted CSS3 features all over the place these days so this goes straight into the toolkit. Although, I’m not too keen on the HTML5 enabler functionality – it’s not really good enough to require JS to be able to style certain tags, is it?

Fix Outlook

Microsoft have confirmed they plan on using the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010. This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more. […] Let’s use Twitter to send a clear message to Microsoft.

The campaign itself I’m not too fussed by (although we do send HTML emails at work, but if those emails don’t look nice in Outlook – and they work in Gmail/Hotmail – then that’s Outlook’s problem), but the site itself is pretty nifty with its real-time aggregation of Tweets. It reminds me of what we did on the Albert Hammond Jr. site, although doing via Twitter is pretty cool and something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now (probably using Twivatar just to make it easy).

(Via Ben Ward)