David Emery Online

Friday Links XXI

The Official stevenf iPhone Review – “Amusingly, web pages with the most flexible layouts (say a table with a single stretchy column) have the most trouble adapting to the iPhone usage pattern, because iPhone Safari renders the page to a fixed width, rather than wrapping words like most mobile browsers, you’ll end up zooming and panning on these types of pages.” – you can never make any assumptions about what a user’s browser does to your pages.

FreeBurner for Everyone – very nice, although I’m starting to worry quite how much data Google has of mine. If they add Google Analytics integration I may succumb anyway.

Web Sheriff DMCA’s Scouta Over YouTube Content Uploaded By Warner Music – copyright control is a pretty tricky process…

Mossberg: Apple working on Adobe Flash support for iPhone – no real surprise here; I think as most people are locked into a 2 year contract we’re going to see quite a few significant software updates.

Cameron offers bribe in return for censorship – wow – he’s really a lot more clueless then I thought he was. This idea of music censorship is utterly stupid.

May I have your TwitterGram, please? – so, Twitter...

Environ-mental

You can’t failed to have noticed how the current hot topic is the environment; are you “green”? What’s your carbon footprint? Do you recycle? Obviously none of these questions or topics are new as such, but they seem to be ever more prevalent in the media, mostly due to the potential good PR celebrities can manufacture by appearing to be “green”.

Of course, most of the spiel is utter nonsense.

Take the Toyota Prius, for example, which is one of the worst cars on the planet but yet every celebrity (and hence every clueless sheep) seems to have one. I’m sure you won’t find too many people willing to defend the looks, specification, interior design or passenger space as they’re all very sub-par for the high price you pay. ‘But!’ I hear you say ‘It’s very green!’ (imagine said with utter smugness). Well, no it’s not. Yes, the MPG is relatively high, but in this country – unlike the US where most of the celebrity owners roam – we have diesel, which means we have really quite a lot of cars that will do a similar milage on a tank of fuel. And that’s without taking into consideration that the Toyota published...

iPhone Wins

Ok, I know I’ve gone on a bit about the iPhone.

I’ve had complaints.

I endeavoured last week not to mention it at all, which was particularly difficult considering the near complete saturation of the web of every tiny, unimportant detail. So difficult that I actually failed, with a little iPhone UI tidbit on Friday. Sorry about that.

This will hopefully be the last I have to say on the matter, at least until the announcement of what they’re doing over here – assuming, of course, that when they announce the sales figures they’re not either small or massively large.

So, now that the dust has settled I think we can safely say that the iPhone is a phenomenal success. Never before have we seen a product launch have quite such a huge amount of hype, and never before have we seen a product match or exceed it’s hype quite so well.

The parallels with the initial launch of the iPod are uncanny, even down to the little details. They’ve launched to a limited customer base (people willing to use AT&T in the iPhone’s case or only Mac users in the iPod’s case) a product that, by all accounts, has less features then the...

Everythingstream

Two post caught my eye over the weekend, floating above the iPhone tsunami (apparently the iPhone accounted for 1.5% of all blog posts over the weekend): Eventstreaming: The Seed Of A Revolution & iPhone and the future of news.

I think eventstreaming* and lifestreaming are the start of something big.

Just like blogging before it had to wait until the technology was right – readily available web servers and easy to use software in that case – the same is true for eventstreaming; only now are we beginning to have both readily available wireless bandwidth (in the form of both WiFi and 3G mobile access combined with unlimited data plans) and small compact video recorders (in the form of mobile phones) coupled with the ubiquitous computing power needed to process all the data.

Sure, all these things together in one place are still relatively rare, but we’re just at the start here.

We’re still waiting for the true killer app for eventstreaming – the YouTube or the Flickr – but surely it’s just a matter of time. Ustream is the biggest player in this market (which was really popularised by Justin on justin.tv), but I don’t see them as the...

Friday Links XX

Basecamp gets OpenID and “Open Bar” – Nice solution here for having multiple accounts across their different services, without having some convoluted method to joining them all together.

Selling advertising – I guess their is almost no point linking to Seth; if you’re reading this you must be reading him as well…

An entirely new way to stay organized – nice improvements on the interface from Google. With this and Google Analytics, is Google finally paying attention to aesthetics?

Web fonts on the horizon – oh how much I want this to happen! The lack of available fonts is – I think – the biggest issue I have with HTML and CSS a the moment.

OmniWeb Sneaky Peek Builds – OmniWeb 5.6 is so fast; blindingly quick, in fact. It uses the latest version of WebKit, so has a whole load of improvements and the new web inspector.

iPhone’s disappearing spacebar – the iPhone UI is packed full of so many clever details like this.

In search of Eiríkur Smith – art matters – always worth remembering that, I think.

I read the news today, oh boy – brilliant post. Scary times in London, yet again, but life...

Sleep. Needed.

This post is brought to you by Sub Standards.

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Nice guys finish first

Today, if you didn’t know already, was Jack Peñate day.

He’s sitting at #5 in the current singles midweeks with his new single, Torn On The Platform – a perfect slice of indie pop, if indie pop is your sort of thing – and played both an instore in HMV on Oxford St and a headline show at the Scala.

The instore was plagued with sound problems (I guess shops aren’t really designed for live music), but the Scala show was a truly mighty performance. The songs were great and the crowd were completely taken by it; I’ve never seen an act get such a warn reception at that venue. What really made it special though was that you could tell the Jack was truly humbled by the reaction:

“22 Years have been leading up to this moment”.

It really couldn’t have happened to a nice guy – he deserves all the success he can get.

Also both supporting and guesting on one track was the also wonderful Adele. I’ll be honest: the whole female singer/songwriter thing is not my cup of tea, but Adele is special – she has a phenomenal voice and I’m sure we’re going to hear a lot more from her...

News Feed

Dave Winer has an interesting post today linking to the new AOL News beta site, where he opines that the “River Of News” style presentation that they use should be used practically everywhere.

“River Of News” refers to the style of content blocks that blogs (this one included) commonly use, with the latest article at the top and earlier posts underneath in a reverse chronological order. The alternative to this is a format much more similar to traditional newspaper style design, with new items being organised by section or type with little attention being paid to time. Good examples of this are Yahoo.com and NYTimes.com.

I completely agree with Dave here – the “River Of News” format makes so much more sense online, when content is much more likely to be time sensitive. It also much more closely portrays the medium and the technology behind it; most sites are powered by CMS (Content Management Systems) that deal with pieces of content in this manner and internally sort them chronologically.

However, I’m beginning to think that there’s a great improvement to this style of content representation which could work really well across a wide range of different site types: the...

Beirut by the river

“On Monday 25th June, fresh from his appearance at Glastonbury’s Jazz World Stage (Sunday 24th @ 6.40pm) and as a rather original warm-up for his sold out gig the following evening at London’s Koko, Zach and co. will be performing a FREE acoustic gig on London’s South Bank. “

This was how tonight’s festivities were billed, and – simply put – it was a truly amazing gig. There was a “spark” in the air – the band themselves were obviously having a wail of a time, and professed that they were making it up as they went along which suited me and the rest of the crowd just fine.

I’ve written about Beirut before, and live he is every bit as good as on record, backed by a superb troupe of musicians that manage to capture the essence of the record – both slightly ramshackle, but beautiful all at the same time. Near the end of the set most of the band walked out into the audience to play a traditional eastern European folk song – I’m not sure how many gigs that kind of audience interaction would really work; it truly was a special moment.

Luckily I get to see it...

Adele at The Scala, London

This photo was printed in the album booklet which was number 1 in the UK album charts, and has appeared in Clash magazine and NME.