David Emery Online

Design Rants

“I don’t really have a good fix for this one. I ran out of ideas, so no text expandability. But I feel really bad about that, so the guilt makes up for it, right? Right?”

Exactly my thinking when it comes to html/css – have a good go at making it work in the ideal, totally-semantic-markup + no javascript requirement + text-expandable way but sometimes it’s just not pragmatic. Of course, if your html is well written you can always turn off css to get at the content, but that’s hardly a good solution… oh the guilt.

RelatedMail: The Semantic Web comes to Mail

A useful looking Mail.app plugin that finds related emails to the one you’re currently reading. It doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with the Semantic Web, though, which would be pretty nifty – how about showing Twitter/Facebook status next to contact names, for example, or maybe checking Upcoming/Facebook for clashing events when adding something to iCal.

Play Magnatune music on your blog

I’m not sure why more labels and shops don’t let you embed streaming players of their music – it’s great promotion.

Dean Kamen Outdoes Himself (Again)

This is amazing – Dean Kamen (of Segway infamy) has created a prosthetic arm aimed at amputees. It’s not called the ‘Luke arm’ for nothing (fast forward to the arm demos):

Yes, we are living in the future.

Metallica Repents, Sort Of

This is not how to do it. I love that they make a big fuss about pre-ordering and getting the music “first” where first means “midnight on the day of release”, which is the same time you’ll be able to get it on every other download service (and probably cheaper, too).

They seem to have watched Radiohead and NIN do their thing, and ripped it off without any of the innovation or interest. $125 for a 5 LP + CD + Download + “Platinum Mission:Metallica Experience“ (which seems to amount to some live recordings and ringtones…) doesn’t exactly seem like a great deal.

Behind the scenes of Fireworks CS4's UI

Sharing mixtapes is an unstoppable idea. Muxtape is not.

Anthony’s not wrong – the concept of a mixtape or sharing a playlist of tracks with your friends is obviously one that resonates, but centralisation like Muxtape will only lead to the traditional set of legal problems (which will no doubt cripple it).

Decentralisation is the solution.

Women of the web

Hear hear. Hear hear.

asv_tumblelog

A tumblelog plugin for Textpattern which looks very useful as a way of pulling in posts, videos, links and photos on to your site. Irritatingly I found this the day after I had to hack together a way of doing this for an upcoming site… always the way!

Building the Next Last.fm

The new Last.fm beta is very nice – so much clearer and better laid out then before. They also managed to make me lay down some cash to become a subscriber so I could get access – I imagine I’m not the only one…