David Emery Online

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.

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.

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.

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.

Save The Music Fan

The music market is down not due to P2P “piracy,” but for four simple reasons: a) stiff competition for the entertainment dollar with formats like video games and movies, both have much larger marketing spends; b) the replacement cycle is over-digital music does not scratch or wear out like past formats; c) one now has the ability to purchase and listen only to the great songs without filler; and d) mass-merchant retailers today carry only the current hits, with little to no catalog.

I often disagree with Terry McBride – he focuses far to much on self promotion for my liking – but I think he’s dead on here.

Via Faßcinated

Super Furry Animals

We’ve just launched the new site for the Super Furry Animals. It’s not a full blown, all singing-all-dancing affair with lots of sections – instead, it’s a very focused site to promote their forthcoming album which is available on March 16th. Every day there’s going to be a new bit of video shot by them on 4 cameras from their studio – they’ve shot over 4 hours of footage that we’re going to put up one episode a day over the next few weeks.

And of course, on the web-dev tip, try resizing your window (finally figured out how to maxmise the size of the video without cropping)…

Lightness

U2: New album preview – exclusively on Spotify

If you choose to listen to the U2 album exclusive listening party on Spotify, your email we will be shared with the Universal Music Group and U2’s management. UMG may then contact you to invite you to join the U2 Official Mailing List.

I don’t think this is a smart move on Spotify’s part. Sure, Universal will have made this mandatory for Spotify to get the exclusive but it now means that I don’t trust them with my details. It’s a very good way of pissing off your existing early-adopter user base.

Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?

Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?

No:

Hi from Last.fm, I’m one of the founders (and the original founder of audioscrobbler, the music tracking plugin).

I’m not going to write much right now because i’m rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue.

As far as I can tell, the author of this article got a “tip” from one person and decided to make a story out of it. Techcrunch is full of shit, film at 11.

Don’t believe anything you read on TechCrunch.

Looks Like Facebook Just Took The Top Spot Among Social Media Sites

This past December we reported on how Facebook was coming up on Blogger to steal its top spot among social media sites when measured by total unique visitors worldwide… Now, it appears as though Facebook has finally done it.

Facebook being big is hardly news. No, what’s interesting about this is if you take a look at the graph you’ll see that Flickr is pretty much even-stevens with Geocities.

Yes: Geocities.