David Emery Online"I never felt magic crazy as this..."
I spent a large chunk of Tuesday in a car with a friend driving up to Manchester. He and I were at the University there in the 80s and we were driving up to spec out a project for later this year. He’s a record exec (of course! which of your so-called friends aren’t? I hear you crow). His job requires him to be constantly in contact with people who work with and for him and so I sat in the passenger listening to his speakerphone conversations: lawyers telling him how he was “their guy” and how and they honestly wanted to sign to him, American executives telling him how genuinely excited about their projects they were , new employees telling him how sincerely they were looking forward to their job… It was a veritable sea of love and sincerity. It reminded of my A&R days and how so much of what got people out of bed depended on passion.
Not linked to for any massive ‘point’ that it makes, but because it’s just a nice read.
Also, I feel duty bound to point out that Adele isn’t on a major, and doesn’t have wads of cash behind her (well, she does now but that’s because she’s earned it).
Visit ➔Kindle on iPhone
• No Kindle required
• Get the best reading experience available on your iPhone or iPod touch
• Access your Kindle books even if you don’t have your Kindle with you
• Automatically synchronizes your last page read between devices with Amazon Whispersync
It’s clear the Amazon means business with their online book store – they know that they’re not really cut out to be hardware manufacturer (although it’s obviously a nice side line). Their key strength is as an online retailer of content, and they obviously want to become the dominant force in this area (much like Apple with the iTunes Store). It wouldn’t surprise me if further down the road we see some kind of more formal Apple – Amazon hook up on this front (with books in the iTunes Store).
A real shame it’s not available outside the US though; I assume that – much like with the music industry – all the deals to provide content need to be done on a region-by-region basis.
Visit ➔Skittles.com
Obviously a massive reference to Modernista but I quite like simplicity of this – it’s not as though anyone is really that interested in a Skittles website, quite frankly, but they need to have one and this is a good compromise. Borne of similar thinking to the XL Recordings site, I imagine (which I should probably add some form of Twitter conversation tracking to…).
Visit ➔Micachu
Following on from my last post about what I’m listening to at the moment yesterday I trundled down to the Notting Hill Arts Club to catch Micachu (with The Shapes firmly in tow).
They were headlining this weeks ROTA, which is a regular club night at the Notting Hill Arts Club except it can’t really be called a night considering it’s on from 4pm until 8pm. I am all about the matinée gigs so this is right up my street – see the headline act and still get home by 20:30, what more could you want?
Before Micachu I caught both Favours for Sailors and The Old Romantic Killer Band. Favours for Sailors were good fun (if hardly groundbreaking) and obviously have an exceptional name. Sadly neither of the these things can be said of TORKB (not going to type that in full twice), except the bit about being hardly groundbreaking – they were bluesy-rock by the numbers; they had obviously seen The Black Keys and gone “let’s do that” and added very little in the process. Also, the singer threw up on stage at the end of the last song – it’s not big, clever or shocking,...
Read more ➔The Big Pink: Velvet
This is the most exciting new song I’ve heard in so very long; The Big Pink are – finally – a proper, interesting, innovative British band, which it feels like we haven’t seen in ages:
Play it again and again and again until it gets under your skin.
Visit ➔Cappuccino is not designed for building web sites
Them: With Cappuccino, you don’t need to know HTML. You’ll never write a line of CSS. You don’t ever have interact with DOM.
Ben: Everything that’s wrong about Cappuccino, quoted from their own about page. I actually get angry about this.
Ben has hit the nail on the head here. Cappuccino and the new Atlas IDE are both very impressive feats of coding, but are based on completely faulty thinking. I haven’t used a ‘web app’ that behaves like a desktop app that I like – look at Gmail, Flickr, Facebook et al – and I’m not sure why anybody (other then desktop application developers) would think it’s a good idea.
Spotify is a good example – there are quite a few competitors with similar offerings – iMeem, We7 etc – but because they’re a desktop app the user experience is so much better. Some things should be in the browser, some things shouldn’t.
And don’t get me started on the whole “you don’t need to know html/css/js” malarky – it’s akin to calling yourself a graphic designer and using PowerPoint and clipart.
Visit ➔OmniWeb and three other Omni apps set free
The Omni Group, those loveable guys behind OmniWeb, has announced that it’s setting free four of its previously for-pay Mac applications. As of today, OmniDazzle, OmniDiskSweeper, OmniObjectMeter, and, of course, the Mac web browser with a cult-like following, OmniWeb, are now free to the public, fully-functioning and sans license. […] “By making these applications—which are not currently under active development—available as free downloads, we hope that more people are able to enjoy using them without the barrier of cost.”
The timing of this is rather interesting – I switched from OmniWeb to the new Safari 4 beta (which is very good so far) today. I’m a big OmniWeb fan – it offers so many compelling features – but it’s in serious need of some work done to it as it’s falling behind Safari, Firefox and (soon on the Mac) Google Chrome. Safari 4 runs rings around it in terms of speed and UI, but it still lacks some of the OmniWeb power features like visual tabs (although you can get a slightly worse implementation in SafariStand), Workspaces and Zoomable text areas.
Visit ➔Cufon
Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set:
- No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client
- Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market
- Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases
- Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text
And now, after nearly a year of planning and research we believe that these requirements have been met.
This looks very promising – it’s so much faster then sIFR (which I reluctantly use here) – to the extent it’s as fast as real text is to load. All the need to do is support :hover states for links and I’ll switch wholesale.
Visit ➔End Game: Spotify on the iPhone
Spotify, the cloud-based music service whose catalog includes all of the major labels and lots of indies, is coming soon to the iPhone. […] This is all assuming that Apple/AT&T and other wireless gatekeepers permit the service. Apple has been notoriously resistant to the idea of music subscriptions.
I don’t see why Apple would refuse a potential Spotify app considering they have not only accepted the Last.fm app – which does similar things – they’re using it on their TV ads. However, with the state of wireless connectivity the way it is at the moment – in central London at least – I’m not going to get too excited just yet. I’ve had a go at using assorted streaming music apps on my iPhone and unless you have access to WiFi for at least some of the time they don’t well enough to get mass adoption. Most people aren’t going put up with long buffer times and drop outs half way through songs.
On a slightly unrelated note I find it very strange that in the Spotify desktop app (and replicated in the forthcoming iPhone app) there’s no way to ‘browse’ the music, only to search. I pretty much live in the browse mode in iTunes, and it seems like a much more natural way of getting round a large music catalogue – typically when I’m faced with a new Spotify window I get paralysed by choice; I know there’s practically everything there, so instantly I can’t remember one band I want to listen to to type in the search box.
Visit ➔