David Emery OnlineFriday Links XXVI
.Mac Web Gallery – We recommend the following browsers. – Come on Apple, you can do better then that. And don’t get be started on the 400KB+ of javascript it uses as well…
My iTunes – interesting to see Apple finally waking up to the marketing opportunities available on the social web.
Change of Face – nice subtle tweaks from Mr Hicks.
ISPs to BBC: We will throttle iPlayer unless you pay up – this is pretty much extortion, as far as I can see. Especially when you consider that most people are on data-transfer limited connections anyway – they’re just trying to blame the BBC for the limitations they’re trying to force onto people.
Music DRM in critical condition: Universal tests DRM free music sales – no real surprise here, and not doing it with iTunes makes sense if they just what to test the waters (and also hopefully boost iTunes competitors miniscule market share in the process). Interesting to note they include Amazon on the list of retailers, as they still haven’t launched their MP3 store – it must be going to hit any day now on this evidence.
Freedom from the press: Google News lets newsmakers...
Read more ➔Return
Tap.
Tap.
Is this thing on?
Hello again! I’m back and now pretty much caught up – only a mere 8000 odd unread items to get though when I came back. I don’t seem to have missed too much; lots of little things but nothing too exiting seems to be the theme of things.
As seems entirely fitting for the concept of a personal blog, I’ve got some holiday snaps to share with you – think of it as the digital, Web 2.0 equivalent of being forced to sit though a slide-show by your grandparents after they’ve got back from a caravanning holiday to Skegness. I’d like to think that my photos – which are of assorted pictures from central Finland, although some could probably be from anywhere – are slightly more interesting, but I’m not going to kid myself.
On a vaguely interesting personal note almost all these shots were shot using the manual mode on my Canon – it’s nice to feel like I’ve finally fully grasped what things like aperture, shutter speed, histograms etc actually mean and the effect these all have on the final photo.
Taking Flight
Just to let you all know I’m going to away – and without internet access – for the next week or so, so there’s going to be no new posts until next Wednesday at the earliest. I’m also turning on moderation for comments until then, to prevent any spam that might slip though, so don’t be surprised when your comments don’t show up.
Hopefully when I get back I might be able to get back on track with posting here – it’s all gone down hill a bit in the last couple of weeks. I’ve been trying to post about the new website we’ve just launched for St. Vincent for the past few days but I’ve just not found the time; it’s one of my favourite sites we’ve launched in ages, and I really like the design – luckily I can say all that as it wasn’t designed by me but by James, who’d I link to if he had a website (hint).
Also, obviously there would probably be a post about all the new Apple stuff released today – in summary: I’m not massively impressed by the new iMac (it’s the old one just with a slighter different case); the...
Read more ➔Friday Links XXV
Unauthorized music downloading hits record levels in UK – survey in people-download-music-ilegally shock.
Building Demolished from the Ground Up Looks Better than New – very cool photo from the city.
A Man of Illegible Letters – my handwriting, much like Khoi’s, is pretty much illegible and has been pretty much forever. Before reading this article, I have to say I was maybe slightly ashamed about my prowess with a pen – writing much more then a sentence or two is practically impossible, I’m that out of practice. But as pointed out, maybe this isn’t such a bad thing – we’re just all moving on.
Amazon’s Flexible Payments Service to compete with Google Checkout, PayPal – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Amazon are the most interesting web company at the moment. They may not capture the headlines like Google or Yahoo, but things like this really underscore how important and interesting they are; the micropayments stuff (which I’ve long been interested in) is very important, I think.
Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) – Limited Beta – having said that they could really do with working on their URLs – I guess they’ve never...
Read more ➔Timeless
As you may have noticed I’m totally behind posting this week, and for that I apologise.
It’s not going to get better, I don’t think, certainly not in the immediate future – I’ve just got too much on at the moment. It’s not that I don’t have time to blog – anyone that tries to spin that one is talking rubbish. What I don’t have, though, is time to think and that quite frankly is the most important bit.
I’m hoping to try and get back on track next week but we’ll have to see how it goes.
It doesn’t help when I see sites like this:
Hell – I’m never going to be that good…
Read more ➔Diagnosed
There is a disease that is common amongst a specific type of computer users. More debilitating then RSI. More productivity sapping then Bohemian Rhapsody coming on the radio. The cause of more lost hours per year then the combined total of all the time spent scrabbling around on the floor when you’ve dropped your pen.
I am, of course, talking about Irritable UI Syndrome, or IUS for short.
IUS typically occurs in Mac using graphic designers, often striking near a deadline when everything isn’t quite going to plan. The symptoms include a necessity to make sure all of your folder icons have custom icons, frequently changing them to match the current latest Iconfactory release; changing the toolbar icons in your apps by swapping out the .tiff resources in the app package; making sure that your windows line up and have enough padding around them (well, they’d look rubbish touching the sides of the screen…); using ShapeShifter to apply a system theme (but only one of the Apple-like themes – most are rubbish) and spending far too long tweaking the perfect amount of transparency on your buddy list in Adium.
For me, IUS comes in fits and waves; like some horrific stomach bug...
Read more ➔Friday Links XXIV
Ebert admits games can be art, but not ‘high art’ – and what is ‘high art’ anyway? Can films be ‘high art’? There’s not much that I’d really classify as art yet (Okami would be, for example), but there’s so much potential there.
9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Network – Ning totally wins against the competition here.
Daring Fireball : iSuppli – guess what; people write articles based on utter rubbish because people will read anything that has the word ‘iPhone’ in.
Mozilla Thunderbird to Find New Home as Mozilla Foundation Focuses on Mozilla Firefox – I can’t decide if this is good or bad; Thunderbird is the only decent cross platform email client (although the Mac version, like Firefox, isn’t that great) – hopefully this move will help, not hinder, it.
World’s First Look at the BBC iPlayer – what an utter waste of time. It sounds like such a huge missed opportunity.
Common Sense from Coca Cola or Even More Proof Of How Designers Are (Still) Wankers – nice work from Coke, and true words from Ben.
Purported photos of new iMac keyboard stir debate – I love the way this looks, and the...
Read more ➔Childish
As promised I have work work stuff to show you, and this time it’s rather fun:
It’s a site to promote the new single by Dizzee Rascal and it’s the most fun site we’ve put together for ages. It’s also possibly the most childish as well – the premise is simple: take a website (any site you like) and stick “pussyole” stickers on it, then send it to your friends. It works very nicely with MySpace pages, and Flickr would be a good target too – it’s basically a rude version of the annotations feature they have.
And yes – it does use the marquee tag. Sorry.
However, this is only one half of the site as we’ve also put together our first Facebook app. The premise of it is similar to the main site: call your friends pussyoles on Facebook. Your latest “diss” then shows up on your profile page, and they appear in your news feed as well. It’s been a very interesting experience putting it together – obviously it’s a fairly simple app, but working within Facebook’s confines can be slightly difficult at times. While they’re streets ahead of the competition in some ways, the platform itself...
Read more ➔Best laid plans
So today’s post was scheduled in to be a bit of a photography post, with the focal point being the rather lovely new camera case I’ve just bought. Maybe slightly boring, I guess, but it’s actually very rare that I plan a post more then about a day in advance so I was kind of looking forward to it. The case was winging it’s way from Australia (for some reason the only country Canon has blessed to sell this case) so it’s been over a week since I ordered it; plenty of time to plan a post.
Enter problem 1: Instead of a little parcel of camera-joy on my desk yesterday morning I instead found a Royal Mail slip, pleasantly informing me that I needed to pay £14.07 custom fee. The camera case is only worth about £40 (depending on the exchange rate) – I can’t for the life of me see how I can owe £14 odd but I have no real choice; I’ve already paid for it so I loose either way.
Enter problem 2: So, off I trudge (in the rain, of course – it is summer after all) to the postal depot which is, as is always...
Read more ➔Us v them, over and over again
Today the UK rejected the music copyright extension proposal, which has been pushed by music industry figureheads like the BPI for quite a while now.
I honestly don’t know how I feel about it.
My gut instinct is that this is a good thing. Copyright was always intended to be a transitory phase – a ‘gift’ from the government almost – to encourage innovation; the original thinking goes that people wouldn’t bother inventing or innovating if someone else could simply copy them straight away. Giving a 50 year grace period where the inventor has the right to prevent other people copying them seemed like the best way to do it.
Similarly, for music the argument goes that if people couldn’t make money from their music – which (supposedly) necessitates copyright – they either would bother or wouldn’t be able to. Of course, it’s plain to see that this is a rather timely discussion considering the current state of the industry with regards to file sharing and the decline in record sales.
The main thrust of the anti-copyright extension side of the fence is that after 50 years an artist will have earned as much money as they really ever need to from it....
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