David Emery OnlineFont Face
The biggest browser news this week comes – as is becoming ever more frequent – from the WebKit team, as they’ve announced support for the @font-face CSS rules. The @font-face CSS rules allow web developers to specify fonts other then ones included on the users computer – which are a pretty restrictive set – so this is a great move, and perfectly timed just before Mac OS X 10.5 comes out. Hopefully this will ship near the end of the month with this addition intact, and they’re roll it out to Mac OS X 10.4 and Windows in the form of a final Safari 3 release too.
Web developers have long fought long and hard against the brick wall that is the limited font set that can be guaranteed to be on a users computer – you’re pretty much limited to Arial, Helvetica, Times, Courier, Verdana, Georgia, Comic Sans, Trebuchet, Arial Black and Impact. The most common way of getting round this limit is to make text as images in an image editor, but obviously this looses all sorts of things like being able to scale the text, easy editing and obviously causes problems with accessibility.
Another slightly more sophisticated solution...
Read more ➔Best in show
Awards shows are a funny beast.
In all honesty, bar a very select few, they are invariably utterly rubbish. Anyone who watch the car crash that was the MTV VMAs a couple of weeks ago will surely agree. On a slight tangent – why is it that major Hollywood filmstars who earn their living from performing lines on a daily basis can’t manage to read an auto-cue when presenting an award? The frequent jokes they try to squeeze in are always so incredibly wooden…
Anyway.
Last night was the Digital Music Awards at the Camden Roundhouse. The DMAs is an awards ceremony that’s worse then most, which is quite impressive; it straddles a murky area between being an industry awards show, rewarding the workers in the digital music industry, and a public awards show, with performances by pop artists and coverage (albeit late night coverage) on Channel 4. Each aspect – the industry side versus the public side – hurts the other; because it’s an industry event the awards are fairly boring (“Best Artist Promotion” anyone?) which means they’re never going to attract performers worth seeing.
This years was no exception, featuring the likes of Natasha Bedingfield, Newton Faulkner and Mutya Buena (from the...
Read more ➔In Rainbows
v
v
v
v
v
v
Stereogum: New Radiohead In Rainbows Out October 10th
v
v
v
Radiohead To Journalists: You’ll Get Your “In Rainbows” MP3s When Everyone Else Does
v
v
v
v
v
v
I always wonder, in situations like these – say an Apple product announcement, for example – whether I should actually bother writing anything at all. Whether all that needs to be said has already been said by people better qualified to say it.
This move by Radiohead is quite brilliant.
But – and this is a big but – it is not revolutionary, unlike what many people would have you believe.
It’s the logical conclusion of the way the industry has been moving ever since Napster first became popular. In fact, I would have been more surprised if Radiohead had traditionally released ‘In Rainbows’. That’s not to say this isn’t an audacious move, or a game changer, as it is, but it’s hardly the most inventive exercise ever.
The core concept around this is leak prevention – in fact, they seem to have to taken leak protection to the ultimate extreme. Not only are they releasing the download before the physical version...
Read more ➔Friday Links XXXII
The Legend of FacilityFocus
“Yes, I know that it says “Search Criteria Required!” at the top of the screen, in red letters, with an exclamation point. But that’s just to fool you into thinking that search criteria are required.”
A wonderful example of everyday unusability.
Radiohead Post Encrypted Messages on Website
I love this kind of stuff – what are they up to?
“Interactive” Album Art: The CD-ROMs Of The Digital-Music Age?
I’m utterly unconvinced that interactive booklets are worth anybody’s time – surely that kind of information if what the internet – specifically a bands website – is for? We can do so much better then a bit of flash or pdf with some lyrics in.
Apple says iPhone unlocking may cause permanent damage
No surprise here, and completely fair enough if you ask me.
Apple iPhone update 1.1.1 offers louder volume, adds iTunes
Guess what – if you hack around with your iPhone, don’t expect to get support from Apple for it. Software updates = support, folks.
Mobile Micro Wifi Router
What a great idea.
4:3 Camera Project
This is exactly what I want; he gets all the details right, even down to bits – like the EVF...
Living in the future
Mmmm, I love it when a plan comes together.
Back in October of last year I wrote about some of the possibilities enabled by having phones with GPS and cameras and utilising them to enable location and context specific information.
This week I came across a post on the Adaptive Path Blog on Nokia’s Point and Find which, while not being quite the same thing, is pretty darn close – just look at the picture they’ve got and compare it to the illustration that went with my original post!
After doing a bit more Google-digging, I found a little more information about it. It seems to revolve around using the high quality camera in most phones for “visual pattern recognition”, so instead of using high-power (and often inaccurate) GPS to figure out where you are and what you’re pointing at it simply looks at what you’re pointing your camera at, figures out what it is and then displays related information about it.
This method I can see having both its upsides and downsides. The removal of GPS from the equation is most definitely a good one, as it’s not a technology that is really mature enough to include in phones at...
Read more ➔
Competition
With little fanfare, Amazon have finally launched their MP3 download store. It’s been widely rumoured for ages so it’s good to see it finally out there.
The details are pretty much as expected: DRM-free 256kbps MP3s, which is a good standard quality to be selling at; variable pricing (with some things cheaper the iTunes, not more expensive); Universal and EMI the only majors on board, along with a host of indies (lots of which still haven’t managed to get DRM-free tracks on iTunes yet) and – of course – it’s US only for the time being.
The take away point: they haven’t screwed it up.
We – for the first time – have a decent competitor to the iTunes Music Store.
That’s not to say it’s by any means perfect, however. For a start, the general design and UI of the store is miles behind iTunes. A general browse, which you can do on iTunes by either drilling down from the home page or by using the browse function, seems to be a lot harder on Amazon. Of course, the flip side of this is that MP3 downloads now show next to the physical version on the rest of Amazon, so I...
Read more ➔Not everyone is a UI designer
Rogue Amoeba have just launched a new app called Radioshift, and by all accounts it’s pretty nifty allowing you to record internet radio (“it’s like Tivo for radio!”). However…
Radioshift is the very definition of a bad mac interface, and sums up all of what is wrong with the state of mac UI design at the moment.
Sorry to be all, like, negative.
The base functionality of the app is very good – in fact I’m very tempted to buy it anyway – but the UI is the product of a mind that’s noticed lots of other apps forging their own custom UI (Apple being the biggest culprit here) and then tried to do it themselves, but without the skill to back it up. This is why we need guidelines – and good ones at that – because while a lot of people can get away with making their own custom UIs, preserving good usability and aesthetics in the process, most people can’t.
We’re right on a precipice here, people.
One step away from the mess that is UI design on Windows.
The main interface of Radioshift is just plain old weird. Instead of using any form of traditional browsing interface to quickly navigate the...
Read more ➔Friday Links XXXI
6th Gen iPods won’t work with Linux, Winamp
The whole iTunes – iPod connection is very important to Apple, so this doesn’t surprise me. Although – could this just be a way of trying to verify that the data is correct, as opposed to anything more sinister?
GIMP UI brainstorm
It never ceases to amaze me how bad open source UIs are – are there no UI designers that do open source work?
Sweating the Small Stuff
Jottit is a nice piece of work – so beautifully simple. Simple doesn’t mean easy to make, though…
SpiralFrog Finally Launches Free Music Download Store
I’m impressed they’ve finally managed to launch, but still utterly unimpressed by the actual service.
Color Photos with the Game Boy Camera
Awesome stuff!
activeCollab 1.0: Plans and Prices
We use an extensively customised version of activeCollab at work – it’s basically a rip-off of BaseCamp that you can install on your own servers. The move to a paid model (it used to be open source) is pretty short sighted, if you ask me – especially at these prices which are outrageous.
Pricing details, updated
Better, but still not worth it – if I’m paying, I’d rather...
Sharing is Caring
Today I thought I’d do your more traditional mp3-blog style ‘what I’m listening to’ post – I realised that I hadn’t actually talked about what I’m listening to at the moment in really quite a long time…
Adele
Now, Adele really isn’t the kind of thing I’d normally listen to but she’s just one of those artists that utterly transcends traditional genre barriers and can be appreciated by pretty much everyone. Quite simply, she has an utterly incredible voice which is coupled with some really stunning songs. I have absolutely no doubt that in 6 months time she will be absolutely everywhere.
Late Of The Pier
Those of you paying attention will have seen me mention Late Of The Pier in my Reading roundup – they were very good live, and on record they’re even better. Certainly quite a contrast to Adele, they straddle the whole indie-dance thing with great aplomb. The track I’ve picked isn’t the current single “Bathroom Gurgle” but the slightly older song “Heartbeat, Flicker, Line”, which is one of the best songs by an unsigned act I’ve heard all year – there’s a bit 2:30 into the song where they give up...
Read more ➔Advertising as content
I’m of the opinion that as a general rule, TV advertising doesn’t really work. In fact, I think most advertising doesn’t work – or at least isn’t worth the amount it costs – but lets stick with TV for the time being.
Most TV adverts are pretty uninspired; I would love to give examples of the average TV ad, but I can’t remember any and that’s exactly the problem: we’ve become completely overexposed to the medium to the point that – in the vast majority of cases – we completely filter it out. It’s completely understandable, as it’s not content that anyone really wants to see. The viewer is there for the program and its content, and the advertising just gets in the way of it. From the get-go you’ve irritated the person you’re trying to sell things to, which is hardly an ideal starting point.
There is though an entire – highly profitable – industry around making TV adverts, which attracts some very talented people which then means we do – on very rare occasions – end up with something that is really quite special. Look at the success of the Cadbury’s Phil Collins gorilla advert, for example: it’s a very...
Read more ➔