David Emery OnlineNo alarms and no surprises
Well, the much-reported UK Apple event has been and gone (where was my invite, Apple?) and as widely predicted saw the announcement of the iPhone for the UK. Widely predicted being a bit of an understatement, of course, as pretty much everything announced had been guessed already.
Gone are the days when we’d have absolutely no idea what Apple was going to announce at their now often ‘media events’; in fact these days pretty much everything is known in advance, except one or two small aspects. At the iPod event a few weeks back that was the iPod classic (which wasn’t rumoured anywhere) and the iPhone price drop, and at the event today the only thing that caught me unawares was the free WiFi hotspot access that’s bundled with the O2 contracts.
The free WiFi is a really nice addition, but it’s the sweetener on a pretty poor deal, all things told, and it’s obviously a token gesture to compensate for the like of 3G. I’m not surprised it doesn’t have 3G – they’re right about the battery life problems it has, and in reality it’s not that much faster then EDGE – but it’s a big psychological barrier in a country...
Read more ➔Colin
You have almost certainly heard about the tragic death of Colin McRae in a helicopter crash this weekend. That itself would be bad enough but the news that his 5 year old son, along with another boy and a family friend, were in the crash as well makes it even worse.
It is a huge loss of motorsport – Colin McRae was quite probably one of the most gifted drivers, no matter what the car; Formula 1, Touring Cars, Motorbikes all – in my opinion – pale in comparison with the skills needed in rallying, and in rallying he was undoubtedly the best. The ability to thread a car down a road you’ve never driven down before – relying solely on your pace drivers shouted directions – at immensely high speed (not that much slower then an F1 car) and across all sorts of varying terrain, including ice, mud and sand, is surely a much greater challenge then any other motorsport can provide.
He was the first British driver to win the World Rally Championship back in 1995, and not only that but he clinched it at the final rally which was held in the UK. Now, I’ll be honest...
Read more ➔Friday Links XXX
London Transport Museum: Poster collection
Very nice set of over 5000 posters – worth having a good look at if you’re needing some inspiration.
Erik Davis on watermarked promotional CDs
It always amazes me how blazé journalists have got about receiving promotional CDs – a lot of them seem to see it as a right, not a privilege. In fact, many seem to view them as a supplemental form of income. The easy solution is – of course – to stop sending them CDs in advance; just let them have it when everyone else does (and do that – digitally at least – as soon as the record is finished).
Weekend Feature: The How of Habbo Hotel
While I can’t help but feel Habbo Hotel is slowly fading away, they’re still a very relevant site and have occasionally been radically innovative.
Adobe gives peek at online Photoshop
It’s fairly obvious that it shares nothing with the “real” Photoshop other then the name, but it’s still interesting never the less.
Coda Toolbar and the Three Pixel Conundrum
It’s these details that really matter, if you ask me, across all sorts of medium.
Fix the Leopard Folders
You know what? I...
Launched
So, the aforementioned Too Pure Singles Club Launch night was unsurprisingly a massive success. A good time, as they say, was had by all. It was certainly an eclectic lineup, but I think that was the strength of the night more then anything else – you very rarely find such varied acts all sharing a bill.
First up was Vera November, otherwise known as Verity from indie funsters Electrelane. I was pleasantly surprised, I have to admit, as I’m not the biggest fan of Electrelane – they’re good when they rock out, but I’m not big on their more vocal-led songs, and Verity is the lead vocalist. However, Vera November is really nothing like Electrelane, being much more electronic and loop based – to very good effect, I may add. It also got a bit jazz halfway through with the addition of a saxophone into the surge of loops, which isn’t a bad thing in my book.
Slight aside – I can no longer think or say “saxophone”, I always end up with “saxo-ma-phone”. God darn Simpsons…
Next up was It Hugs Back. Now, I’ll be honest, they really aren’t my cup of tea – they straddle that particular form of indie which...
Read more ➔Brands Versus Bands
Tomorrow is the launch of the Too Pure Singles Club at the Buffalo Bar in Islington, London and I would very much encourage everyone to come (more info on Upcoming). It should be a fun night, especially as the wonderful Future Of The Left are headlining.
I also think the Singles Club itself is worthy of a bit of discussion; while it’s nothing revolutionary I think it in essence both charts the strengths of a record label and also the direction the industry as a whole needs to go in the future. The concept is quite simple – every month Too Pure releases a single on limited vinyl and download (the download being via Rough Trade) and you pay £30 for a years worth, getting one in the post for 12 months.
This concept really plays into what the primary strength of a label is: a filter for music. Their has been much talk – both recently and stretching back since digital music really took off – about how record labels are “doomed” as technology and distribution have got to a point where artists can release records without label backing. This has got to the point where it’s...
Read more ➔Antisocial
This evening I went to see the delightful Emma Pollock who put on an album launch for her new album “Watch The Fireworks” at The Social in central London. She was as good as ever, but I’m not really a fan of The Social which put a dampener on things somewhat.
I like the idea of The Social, with it’s relaxed demeanour and cosy interior, but when it gets full it turns into somewhere pretty appalling to actually see an artist perform. It’s just too small, really, and the shape around the stage is all wrong so there’s very few places you can stand and guarantee being able to see anything.
Of course, as ever I was trying to take photos which hit upon exactly this problem – getting close wasn’t an option as it was so packed, so I had to zoom in and duck and weave between the (rather tall) people standing in front of me. This was confounded by the utterly rubbish lighting they’ve got in there – I guess they’re trying to create a “mood”, but they essentially don’t have any powerful lights, meaning I had to either switch to ISO 800 (which is to noisy to...
Read more ➔Version Ten
For those of you reading this in a RSS Reader, this is one of those posts that you really need to click through to the site and read.
Yes, I’ve redesigned again.
Imagine some party poppers going off, and balloons drifting down from the ceiling
I hope you all like it! I was getting slightly sick of the red, especially for the text, so I thought I’d make the move to black text with colour accents. As an aside, this is the first time this site has actually used black text – it’s always been either grey, white or red before.
Of course, when faced with trying to decide what colour to make the accents I was a bit stumped; I didn’t want to use red – I’m so over red – and blue would be the next choice, but it’s a bit over used, etc. So I cheated, reusing a device I last used a couple of designs ago (before the wave of red). This time it’s been helped along be judicious use of opacity filters, and transparent pngs. Also – for the first time, and I feel slightly bad about it – I’ve used a Firefox CSS hack to help fix it’s...
Read more ➔Friday Links XXIX
Throwing Music: Thoughts On Sustainability – “In other words, music grows on trees, but money doesn’t”
Most of your pictures suck – at Reading last weekend I took 1121 pictures, of which 118 were good enough to post to Flickr; a 10% success rate seems to be about my average, with only about 10% of those being what I’d term “quite good”.
Buy a Mac, get TextMate! – I still don’t get TextMate – it just does work “right” for me – but lots of people really, really like it…
NYT: The Music Man – an interesting article, but I’m still not convinced by the whole music subscription thing as he describes it.
Five Facts About Google Phone – Point 1: there are no facts about the Google Phone; we don’t even know it exists. Point 2: why are people so interested in a Google Phone when they have no track record for producing consumer hardware, and a spotty record for consumers UIs?
Soho Coffee – Starbucks is the king for me, but I definitely want to try and find some more authentic, less globalised alternatives. Sadly, every time I’ve tryed somewhere different the coffee has been pretty awful…
On Pricing
As evidenced by all the current talk around the iPhone’s pricing point, the value of goods is a very hard thing to really pin down. In the case of the iPhone, I think the value is fairly clear (it has a high value) and many, many people were prepared to pay for it at its original price.
Of course they’re going to be pretty irritated by a 30% price drop, but it’s not like they’ve actually lost anything. In fact, with the $100 store credit they’ve now got they’ve come out on top: they paid a price that they found reasonable, and got $100 for free!
I can’t help but think that the whole thing was carefully orchestrated to make the iPhone price drop as publicised as possible; Apple quite patently wants lots of people to buy them, so what better thing to do then to try a create a “proper” story out of a simple price drop?
Continuing on the topic of pricing, how much would pay for a single (of the music variety)?
£0.99?
£1.99?
£3.99?
£100?
It is, of course, just a savvy piece of marketing. Faced with the prospect of trying to sell 10,000 £0.99 singles – which...
Read more ➔Lots of new iPods
So.
Not exactly a massive surprise on any counts, but what Apple announced today does have some interesting aspects to it, despite having mostly been utterly spoiled by the spot-on rumours that had been circling around. I did find it quite interesting how comprehensive the event was, though, leaving no iPod-stone untouched.
Lets run though the announcements in the order they came. First up came an completely dull iPod Shuffle update, the only changes being different – worse – colours, including a ‘Project (RED)’ model. Wow – thanks guys, really amazing update you’ve done there.
Luckily, the iPod Nano update is a little more substantial – it’s a completely new model, looking very much like a shrunken full size iPod. The new interface, which adds all sorts of animation and artwork-based additions along with the now obligatory CoverFlow mode (which is quite nifty to see on an iPod) looks like a pretty solid upgrade. The bigger screen, video viewing and games are all very nice but I do feel they’ve made it a bit too big – I’m not sure if anyone was crying out for a Nano that played video Vs a smaller Nano.
And the colours are worse.
Onto the...
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