David Emery Online

Rapper DMX on Barack Obama

Guess what all you middle class white people that read the internet? Most people (even in the US) couldn’t care less about the forthcoming presidential election, let alone about who might be in the running to run.

And really, why would they care? Is it really going to make any difference to them?

Safari 3.1

Awesomeness – Apple have released a new version of Safari for Mac and Windows (and they still releasing for 10.4 as well, which is nice) that supports CSS Animation, Transitions and Web fonts among other things. That means the time I spent when I launched this design adding CSS Animations wasn’t in vain (so if you’ve just upgraded, this is probably a good site to test it out in).

Different Models

So, now we can add another ‘model’ into the mix:

The Raconteurs ‘Consolers of the Lonely’ To Be Released March 25th

This model is the release-as-soon-as-possible method (which seems to be the common theme with all these release strategies) with a twist, as it’s released everywhere as soon as possible – physically as well as digitally. It’s interesting as it makes a fundamental break from the other two high profile experiments (Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails) by removing the focus on direct sales that they had – this is a relatively traditional release, simply with the 3 month lead time you typically get reduced down to one week.

This strikes me as a far more realistic and a sustainable model that will work for far more artists.

It’s also a return to how things used to be. Back in the day – I’m reliably informed – records were made, got into record shops when they were ready and then promoted which seems like a far more sensible way of doing it. Why on earth should a record get sat on for 3 months while people in the press get to hear it, make the decisions on whether people should like it and (probably)...

Martian Headsets

4749 words that, if you’re a web developer, are a must read. The definitive last word in all this IE standards stuff that’s been going round recently, although that last word could well be ‘screwed’.

furbo.org · Brain surgeons

Always a bit of a shock to find someone that actually knows what they’re talking about.

“As someone who has been involved in iPhone development for the past six months, please let me offer you a healthy dose of reality.

Twitterrific on the iPhone could definitely make use of a background process to gather new tweets. In fact, a prototype version of the software did just that. And it was a huge design failure: after doing XML queries every 5 minutes, the phone’s battery was almost dead after 4 hours.”

Flickr Video Said To Be Launching Next Month

I’m interested to see what the Flickr team can come up with when it comes to video; I think Vimeo comes closest to getting it ‘right’ but there’s still a lot of room for Flickr-style improvement.

The Dry Side

A perfect example of good design, and improving something that no one would think needs improving.

Gravatar Blog: Big changes afoot

Nice to see Gravatar back up and running properly, and I’m sure the re-write from RoR to PHP had nothing to do with it being nice and fast now. Nothing at all. Not one bit.

I’ve now got Gravatar’s up and running here, using the nice and simple GlxGravatar Textpattern plugin. Took all of 5 mins to implement, so there’s no excuse, folks.

Out of Five | Stuff reviewed through Twitter

Simple service that lets you review things via Twitter. More ambient information etc…

Live from SW18

I can’t let our American cousins have all the fun, so today I’m going to vaguely attempt some kind of live blog. Our office isn’t quite as SXSW-empty as I think the US one is, but there’s still a bit of a vibe of ‘left-out-ness’ around these parts…

10:06

Email count overnight: 17, although 5 of those are spam that have managed to get through 2 different spam filters and 3 of them are comments on the Jack Penate site.

I’m shocked – SHOCKED – that two of my departmental colleagues haven’t turned up yet.

10:14

Looking at a design for something we’re doing for the Breeders – looks good!

10.25

Pondering finally setting up a work blog that we can post to, which has been sidelined many times by bigger things, so that silly things like this can go where they really should do.

10:27

Jane has, unsurprisingly, received a package. Jane gets packages every day, which makes all of us non-package-receivers sad.

10.39

Ok, this live blogging thing is getting pretty tiring now and possibly the most boring thing anyone else could read, like ever. As regular readers will know, however, being boring is not going to stop me. Oh no.

Just making a couple of...