David Emery OnlineIsle Of Tune Lets You Compose Music By Um, City Planning
Isle of Tune lets you create whole songs by building a little town using objects like streetlamps, houses and trees to make sounds. There is even a collection of pre-built loops for those of us less musically inclined.
Loving this, especially considering that the iPad version of SimCity has kickstarted that particular addition again… (p.s. if you haven’t got it yet, get it – it’s a steal for 59p).
Visit ➔Archive Fever
What were you thinking about on November 23rd, 2009? You probably have no idea, but Twitter might. What was your personal soundtrack to the summer of ’07? Ask Last.fm. Hit up Dopplr to find out how many miles you travelled last year, Foursquare for the Berlin bar that people you know check in to more than any other, or Facebook to see the photos of the last time you hung out with your best friend on the other side of the world.
Without deliberate planning, we have created amazing new tools for remembering. The real-time web might just be the most elaborate and widely-adopted architecture for self-archival ever created.
I’ve wanted something like this for ages – in fact, almost every time I come to redesigning this site my first thoughts are around the idea of making it timeline-based, across all the different medium I spew content out on, so you could scroll around and see what I tweeted, took photos of and blogged about in June 2009 (for example).
Sadly time has always got in the way…
Visit ➔WebKit Clock
This site is driven with HTML5 canvas, CSS3, JavaScript, Web Fonts, SVG and NO image files. It's optimized to WebKit rendering engine and you can see it with Safari and Google Chrome.
Very impressive. I really need to get a handle on all of this Canvas stuff…
Visit ➔Spotify CEO: Music on the Web Will Be More Popular Than Photos
Speaking at All Things Digital’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference on Tuesday in San Francisco, Ek said that he thinks “music on the web will probably surpass the popularity of photos.”
Interesting that he says that for two reasons:
1) Arguably it is already.
2) Spotify isn’t on the web; it’s a internet connected client application. I’d love them to be a web app, with embedable tracks á la YouTube, but I don’t see it happening any time soon.
Visit ➔Ben the Bodyguard
Protecting your passwords, photos, contacts and other sensitive stuff on your iPhone® or iPod touch®
Very nifty site design – scroll down for cleverness.
Visit ➔The Decline and Fall of E-Mail
I have in my computer every e-mail message I have sent or received since 1992. Minus the obvious spam, this database comes to about half a million messages from people as varied (or similar, if you think about it) as Larry Ellison and Larry Flynt. But lately my e-mail seems to be dying.
The latest in a long line of ‘email is dead’ articles; there’s some grain of truth to it – I certainly receive a tiny amount of personal emails these days, with Twitter, Facebook and SMS (in order of least personal to most personal) picking up the slack.
What these communication methods don’t account for though is work – I wouldn’t dream of using Facebook for work communications and I’m sure I’m not the only one (do you want to be friends with everyone you work with?). Email for work purposes seems pretty unchallenged to me.
Visit ➔Generation Why?
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.
A fascinating – albeit long – article by Zadie Smith for the New York Review of Books on The Social Network (a film which you really should go and see if you haven’t already).
Lots of good points are raised, but I’ve picked this quote out as it represents a feeling that I’ve seen crop up in a few places – that being that in someway online communications are in someway lesser then traditional forms – and it’s a feeling that I think is seriously wrongheaded.
Social network presences for me are not a replacement for physical interaction but an additional representation of yourself. In fact, I think often they can represent a person better then they do in real life, depending on the character.
Another point worth pointing out – there’s also an underlying tone of ‘all your data belongs to facebook’ but that’s no more relevant then what phone network you use; it’s just the delivery method – it’s the content, which can be (often simultaneously) on all sorts of sites, that matters.
Visit ➔Designing media?
What’s going on here?
A communication film. Music and a book for fans to purchase. An iPhone app to do it yourself, and a place to socialise. Two video sketches, and a broad discussion.
What I think we’re doing is designing media.
I’ve already linked to several o the things referenced in this post; what they’re doing over at BERG is very interesting indeed.
This is marketing – a word often with negative connotations – at its best.
Visit ➔Why the Daily, Murdoch’s “tablet newspaper,” will be DOA
When I first heard the phrase “iPad newspaper” — shorthand for Rupert Murdoch’s not-so-secret-any-more new project — I puzzled over its oxymoronic implications. Forget about the, you know, iPad/paper contradiction and think about the business. Murdoch is reportedly spending $30 million on this thing. Could that possibly pay off with a product that’s tethered to a single, new platform? Puzzled, I tweeted, “Will they stop me from reading it on my desktop?”
I certainly think there’s room for tablet based publications – and money to be made – but not for news-based ones; on an internet enabled device there’s no way to compete against the practically endless supply of free (and quality) news sources.
Visit ➔Benjamin De Cock’s vCard
Fancy CSS
Very nice example of CSS 3 animations and transitions – love the little clouds of smoke.
Visit ➔