David Emery Online

Friday Links XIX

Just one post – So very true; even if you only post one post, that’s still adding value to the world at large thanks to Google et al.

Pagination 101 – it’s so easy to overlook how important some of the small details can be to the overall user experience.

Long overdue post about the London Olympic 2012 logo. – Ben hits the nail on the head; I completly agree – I like it, and think we could have got something so much worse. In fact, I think (other then the rubbish font choice for “London”) it may be the best Olympic logo for years.

Yet another one more thing… a new Web Inspector! – the WebKit team at Apple is really firing on all cylinders at the moment; this is a great addition to Safari and seems to work better then Firebug for Firefox which is no mean feet. I’d love it if OmniGroup would release an OmniWeb update that uses it.

iPhone – A Guided Tour – this is really not helping. The UI looks amazingly well thought out, and just works so well. I wonder if one of the motivations for not releasing a SDK at...

Music Festival?

I am not at Glastonbury.

Unlike almost everyone else I know.

The office is barren, like a desolate wasteland. Oh, sorry – that’s Glastonbury, I’m getting all mixed up.

Just to make it absolutely, positively, 100% clear: I did not want to go to Glastonbury this year, and I’m incredibly happy that I’m not there. In the rain.

In fact, I’ll go as far as saying that I think Glastonbury represents all that is wrong with the music industry today; all wrapped up in one mud-filled neat little package.

Glastonbury, as much as it is referred to as a music festival, is not about the music – it’s about the “experience”, which in other words means it’s about drinking so much that you can’t remember what you did on Saturday. This – luckily enough for the Eavis clan – tallies nicely what the majority of the population, and the majority of people working in the music industry, want to do with their time.

You can tell that Glastonbury is not a real music festival by taking a gander at the line-up, and the utter lack of anything that’s not predictable or mainstream.

Any festival that manages to have Amy Winehouse play not once but twice...

Social networks seem to matter, honest

Apple really, really cares about the iPhone.

In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Apple engage in such a sustained push for any one product before. Not only have we had a – practically – iPhone-only keynote by Steve Jobs in January, but we’ve had a steady drip of features and news since then.

Earlier this week came the news that the iPhone has a surprisingly long battery life, which was one of the main negative points people were predicating, along with the scratch-ability of the screen which also got an upgrade to glass at the same time.

Today we have the news that the iPhone is going to support YouTube. It looks like a very nice addition to the iPhone feature set, and really cements the Google<-->Apple relationship. YouTube have just rolled out a mobile version of the site (m.youtube.com), which is utterly woeful in comparison to the iPhone app – indeed, I couldn’t get to work on my Nokia N70, and I’ve heard reports that it doesn’t work on the Nokia N95 as well, which is being seen as one of the better iPhone rivals.

Of course, this announcement really, really makes a mockery of the WWDC announcement...

Mass Manipulation

Censors ban ‘brutal’ video game

‘The video game Manhunt 2 was rejected for its “unrelenting focus on stalking and brutal slaying”, the British Board of Film Classification said.’

‘The parents of a Leicester schoolboy who blamed the original game for the murder of their 14-year-old son said they were “absolutely elated”.’

‘His parents believe the killer, Warren LeBlanc, 17, was inspired by the game.’

What a load of utter rubbish.

I’m sick and tired of the press taking advantage of tragedy to promote their simplistic agenda. I’m sick and tired of censorship. I’m sick and tired of people blaming ridiculous scapegoats for the causes of terrible events.

So, Mr Warren LeBlanc, 17, was a completely normal, well adjusted member of society before he played the game? Exactly at what moment did he turn into a murderer? When he turned on the machine? When he read the instruction manual (well, except no-one really does that)? When he pressed the “Start” button?

The BBFC does not have the right to prevent people from buying this game. Sure, they have the right to prevent people under the age of 18 – like the murderer LeBlanc – from buying this game, but preventing adults from buying it is completely unjustifiable.

We’re...

Out with the old, in with the old

I, quite frankly, couldn’t care less that Yahoo! has done a CEO swap, which is a shame as it seems to be the only news about today.

Out with the old, in with the old.

How novel.

I’m sure I’ve written before about Yahoo!’s inescapable success by irrelevancy – by that I mean that they seem to manage to be both by-and-large irrelevant when it comes to actual product (other then the ones they buy and let wither) while simultaneously getting a shed load of traffic to all of its assorted properties.

The problem with Yahoo! is that they are a media company, masquerading as a ostensibly a software company. Sure, Yahoo! has some incredible developers working for them, and you do see the fruits of their labors occasionally (like the YUI library, for example), but in the grand scale of things they very rarely launch anything technologically innovative using any of their core properties.

What Yahoo! now seems to be are simply what all the media conglomerates need to be: the product is content, the revenue stream is advertising and it’s built on a solid base of in-house developers innovating interesting ways of getting that content in front of people so they can...

Friday Links XVIII

Opera developing Flash replacement for mobile browser – I’m really interested in the idea of having native audio and video in the browser; it seems obvious when you think about it.

HTML5 differences from HTML4 – these video and audio tags appear here too, along with – finally! – some more native controls for web application developers to use.

Where Are The High Resolution Displays? – the high res are coming, no doubt about it – this post conveniently leaves out things like the HD screen in the new 17” MacBook Pro (133 dpi) and the screen on the iPhone (160 dpi).

YouTube Testing New Beta Design, Bigger Player – the bigger the player, the better I think. They also recently implemented support for Flash 9 full screen, which works really nicely, although they really need to up the quality of their videos.

How would you like to see iTunes improved? – I would love to see some form of built-in Last.fm-style statistics about my music; pretty graphs about my favorite artists, songs etc. Extending that out, via the iTunes store, to something where you can share that data with your friends would rock, too.

First, they came for...

Corporate Festival London

Wireless – sorry, that should be “O2 Wireless Festival 2007 London” – is quite a strange little festival.

On the one hand, it has a great location – slap bang in the middle of London – but on the other hand it’s strangely soulless, feeling (accurately, I imagine) like some suits in a boardroom decided they should put on a rock festival that the kids would like so they could sell some phones.

Oddly, it sort of works.

It would have been much better had Modest Mouse played, but they had to pull out at the last minute. Quick tangent time: I hate it when people can’t be bothered to update their website. Take a look at the Official Wireless News page – don’t you think that mentioning that one of the bands have pulled out would be news worthy?

Anyway, it was more then made up for by the combined might of Queens of the Stone Age and The White Stripes – you couldn’t ask for two better bands to play in my opinion. I’ve already talked about the White Stripes enough this week I think – they were, again, excellent, and it was nice that they played a completely different...

Icky Thump

I just got back from seeing The White Stripes perform a tiny – for them at least – gig at the Rivoli Ballroom, deep in the depths of nowhere (i.e. South London).

Unsurprisingly, they were utterly amazing.

Every time I see The White Stripes live I’m just bowled over by how good they are, and this was no exception. Jack White is simply one of the best guitar players of all time, and the format of him and Meg just works so well. The key thing that elevates it all above the best of the rest is the spontaneity – they’re quite happy to switch songs halfway though, without missing a beat, or rework a classic seemingly on the fly: they shifted from ‘Apple Blossom’ seamlessly to ‘Hardest Button to Button’, but to make it work ‘Hardest Button to Button’ – one of their larger hits – was in a completely different time signature and key.

In many ways Meg is the perfect foil to Jack; where he is on the ragged edge, cheap guitars and lots of distortion – using his skill to get him out of any sticky situations – Meg is the opposite; simple (although clean may be a better...

Safari Elsewhere

This time round, thanks to @media, I didn’t quite have time for my normal post with pre-WWDC predictions.

Probably a good thing, it turns out, as I would have been mostly wrong.

The biggest surprise is that – for me at least – 10.5 isn’t the most exiting news coming out of WWDC; that accolade has to be reserved for Safari on Windows, which came pretty far out of left field.

From the host of “I’ve just installed it now” reports I’ve read, it seems to offer practically pixel perfect rendering across the Mac and the Windows versions, which is a first – even Firefox, which uses the same rendering engine across the different platforms, shows significant differences over the platform divide. This has been achieved by bypassing Window’s (fairly rubbish, if you ask me) built in font rendering – which is where Firefox falls down – and using the same font rendering that Mac OS X uses.

Also new is speed – Safari 3 on the Mac is significantly quicker then every browser I’ve tried, and Apple claims the same on Windows. It also has much improved Javascript support, and the most advanced CSS renderer around (supporting things like text shadows,...

Friday Links XVII

Movable Type 4.0 Beta Launches, Platform To Be Open Sourced – I’m very impressed with the direction Moveable Type is taking; it looks like they could well be a credible competitor to WordPress et al again.

First look: Firefox 3 alpha 5 – I’m not massively impressed with anything I’m seeing here – where’s the much needed interface overhaul? Where are the actually innovative features?

Kiss Boring Interfaces Goodbye With Apple’s New Animated OS – I think one of the major new advances we’re going to see on Monday in 10.5 is a fully animated interface, like what we see in the iPhone UI.

YouTube Hosts First Feature Length Film – and so it starts. This + TV shows + AppleTV = the end of TV as we know it. Sorry Joost.

E-mail is not a platform for design – I completely, wholeheartedly disagree with this. If we had thought the same way about web pages, what would have happened? And are you really trying to say that emails wouldn’t benefit from more structure, hierarchy and semantics like titles, blockquotes and the like?

WCAG Samurai Errata published – definitely worth a read, especially if you work with outside contractors...