David Emery Online

iPhone SDK thoughts

I’m guessing that you, and everyone else in the world who would ever possibly end up reading here, have heard all about the iPhone SDK announcement on Thursday. It was pretty much what I expected, and also what I hoped for; I couldn’t see any way that we were going to get anything other then I proper SDK with proper tools, but also that Apple were going to be the gatekeepers on getting apps on iPhones. It could have been a whole bunch worse then it is, anyway, and the app store is going to be a revolution for any indie developer that’s struggled with marketing and order processing.

It was nice – and appropriate – to see EA showing some demos, as it’s obvious that casual games are going to be one of the largest sellers on the app store. With that large screen, accelerometers and decent 3D performance we could see something really special happen here I think. There’s an interesting article on Boing Boing Gadgets about exactly this topic which goes into it in far more detail then I ever could.

Also interesting – and much linked to – is Jason Fried’s post on 37signals...

SSSS Equals No SXSW

Airport security really is crazy, isn’t it? I can’t believe that they almost forced a plane to land just because someone got a headcount wrong…

ExpressionEngine 2.0 “official” screenshots

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not really a fan of the current version of ExpressionEngine – none of it works quite the way I expect it too, and it certainly doesn’t have the logical, well thought out nature that Textpattern has (although it does offer more features). That being said, these screens of EE 2 are very impressive and it looks like they may finally be able to deliver on the promise that EE 1.5 doesn’t quite deliver on.

BBC iPlayer On iPhone: Behind The Scenes

The encoding tech that drives the iPlayer is very impressive, as is the new iPhone compatible version (although it needs a proper native interface). It really feels like we’re in the future when you can wirelessly stream programs onto a small, large screened device flawlessly.

Not learning by example

It seems to me that, even though the music industry has already been through all of this and could serve as a very good example of what not to do, the film and TV industries are making all of the same mistakes when it comes to embracing the effect of the internet on their business.

First things first, they seemed to be blindly stumbling down the path of using restrictive DRM despite the restrictions it’s placing on growing their market. Consumers demand a certain level of control over the product that they are purchasing, and at the moment that control just isn’t allowed; I’m talking about things like being able to media-shift downloaded video (burning onto a DVD, for example), which is prevented by almost every major online video store I’ve come across.

No consumer control = no success.

It feels like what the online video industry needs is what the music industry got when Apple launched the iTunes Music Store; someone who understands that to get people using the service they need to be a bit looser with the freedoms they deny – before iTunes came along, most other music stores featured DRM that didn’t let people burn...

The Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit

Looking pretty good – I haven’t had a chance to install it yet, but IE8 has lots of very promising features (including some microformats support!).

I did find this amusing titbit in the release notes, considering the current push by Microsoft with Silverlight as a Adobe Flash competitor:

Adobe AIR Download Center Web site
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 crashes when you access the following Adobe AIR Download Center Web site:
http://get.adobe.com/air
No workaround is currently available for this issue.

Last.fm's SXSW Band Aid

Last.fm have done a recommendation service for what bands to see at SXSW this year, based on the music in your Last.fm profile. Very nifty – just wish I was going so I could you it…

1,000 True Fans

Very interesting article on the importance of ‘true’ fans – ones that will buy everything you produce and drive 200 miles just to see you play. On a similar topic it’s interesting to note that the $300 ultra-deluxe version of the Nine Inch Nails album – which was limited to 2500 copies – sold out within 24 hours.

Microsoft's Interoperability Principles and IE8

Great stuff – Microsoft have reversed their decision about all this IE8-behaving-like-IE7-by-default rubbish. Good on them!

The Radiohead Standard

Today, Nine Inch Nails have self released their new album, Ghosts I-IV. It’s the perfect example of the new model of record releasing; while we still haven’t quite figured out the best way of making use of the internet with regard to recorded music, it looks like some form of new standard is emerging.

(The Radiohead standard.)

The NIN release has the full compliment of expected formats, hell – they even manage to crowbar in a semi ‘pay what you like’ style system by giving away the first disk for free. Not only that, they’ve seeded it to all the popular torrent sites as well (which is useful as I couldn’t get past the CAPTCHA on the download page…). Along with the free 9 track download, there’s also a full 36 track download version for $5, a $10 2xCD version, a $75 deluxe edition (which comes with a Blu-ray of hi-def audio files and a DVD of the multi-track files) and an utterly comprehensive $300 ultra-deluxe version which has vinyl, art prints and all sorts of other things.

What’s most interesting about the whole thing is the complete lack of innovation coming from a band all about innovation. When...