David Emery OnlineCSS Regions Prototype
This page contains information regarding a WebKit-based prototype of CSS Regions, the proposed additions from Adobe to the W3C CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) modules to build complex, magazine-like layouts using web standards. Capturing in digital form the complex layouts of a typical magazine, newspaper, or textbook requires capabilities beyond those possible with the existing CSS modules. CSS Regions is a proposal that describes how content creators can use some additional basic building blocks to express complex layouts with CSS.
Quite an interesing development – Adobe are obviously looking to move to HTML for their emagazine publishing workflow, which will be far better then what they use currently (which is essentially lots of pngs outputted by InDesign).
Visit ➔The “book” is dead
But more to the point, it would be full of piracy-related terms because that’s what people search for. Google’s suggestions come from actual searches. It’s a mirror onto the world, descriptive not prescriptive. If you don’t like how the world looks in the mirror, don’t blame the mirror.
Interesting post on how the book industry is now facing up to digital piracy, much in the same way the music industry has (or hasn’t, depending on your point of view). It also shows how much work Google needs to do with its search results – not to eliminate copyright infringing results, as that’s practically impossible, but to eliminate the huge amount of fake sites that clog up most results pages.
Visit ➔Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation
I don’t need every customer. I’m primarily in the business of selling a product for money.
Such an easy thing to forget – you can’t please all the people all the time, so there’s no point trying.
Focus is the key.
Visit ➔Response
I was >this< close to redesigning this site yet again.
Regular readers will know that this is a reoccurring addiction of mine.
I even got as far as Dribbbleing some crops from a work in progress design, but – at least for now – it’s all for naught. I just couldn’t quite get it right: close, but no cigar. I liked bits of it, but the overall layout didn’t seem to quite work.
When I thought about it – after, of course, staring at it in Photoshop for hours nudging bits left and right and swapping colours back and forth – I realised that maybe I just needed to tweak the current design, instead of scrapping it completely.
I had two main goals with the redesign, both of which born out of the fact that these days most of the time I use an iPad to browse the web. It needed to look better at smaller sizes, and also I needed to be able to post more easily from my iPad.
Tackling that second point first, there’s no doubt I post less then I used to; this is down to two things I think: firstly, I have way less time then I used...
Read more ➔Push Pop Press: Al Gore's Our Choice
Our Choice will change the way we read books. And quite possibly change the world. In this interactive app, Al Gore surveys the causes of global warming and presents groundbreaking insights and solutions already under study and underway that can help stop the unfolding disaster of global warming. Our Choice melds the vice president's narrative with photography, interactive graphics, animations, and more than an hour of engrossing documentary footage. A new, groundbreaking multi-touch interface allows you to experience that content seamlessly. Pick up and explore anything you see in the book; zoom out to the visual table of contents and quickly browse though the chapters; reach in and explore data-rich interactive graphics.
I’m a fan of both eBooks and eMagazines, and consume quite a lot of both on my iPad; this makes all of that look a bit trivial. The potential of tablets as a new medium for information really excites me.
Also, the site has a lovely little design detail – on a desktop it says “Click” and “Rollover”; on the iPad it’s the same design but it says “Tap” instead.
Visit ➔Photosmith, the Lightroom iPad companion, is now available
We’ve had the pleasure of using Photosmith during its beta period and it has already joined our list of must-have photography apps for Apple’s tablet. If you use Lightroom and own an iPad, we strongly recommend checking out Photosmith.
I do hope Apple have something similar up their sleeve for Aperture and the iPad (and I’d be pretty happy if that involved iPhoto for the iPad at the same time…).
Visit ➔I Just Facebook Like You
Brands dramatically overweight the value of the ‘likes’ their campaigns accrue and treat it as pure social signal. And they make spending decisions based on these unformed notions of community, commitment, sociality. They play for the wrong endgames (high like counts, ‘virality’, shares) without architecting deeper, long-lasting experiences that break out of stream thinking.
Facebook “Likes” are a pretty weird thing now they’ve been turned over to marketeers, aren’t they? Speaking from the position of a marketeer, of course.
In the space of a year they’ve managed to completely own and redefine the meaning of the word “like”.
Visit ➔Read All About It
A few weeks ago now I had the wonderful privilege of working again with Radiohead, this time on the release of The King Of Limbs but more specifically on the distribution of The Universal Sigh, a free newspaper distributed globally on the day of the physical release of the album.
It was quite fun.
It also turns out that doing something in 30-odd territories across the world at the same time on the same day is bloody difficult, but we got there in the end.
Early on in the project we decided that we wanted the online element to try and represent the activity of the event in progress, rather then replicate the actual content in any way (so no official PDF downloadable version, for example) as the whole idea stemmed around the actual physical artefact that is the newspaper. So, to try and represent the event we decided that as we controlled the distribution directly, we could endeavour to take a photo of practically everyone that received a copy, and have a live stream of those photos appear on the site.
Read more ➔Spotify takes the axe to its free service – can it now claim to slash music piracy?
However, this feels like a bad move. In one feel swoop Spotify is reducing its ability to say, with much credibility, that it is out to reduce the amount of piracy. If you can only listen to 10 hrs, and then only five times to one track, how can Spotify claim that it can significantly eat into the massive amount of file-sharing out there?
Obviously there’s little positive to be drawn from this move, but it was inevitable that Spotify was going to have to make some concessions to be able to launch in the US. The success they’ve had in Europe has made those discussions pretty difficult I imagine, as you’ve got the majors trying to weigh up whether they want to let the genie out of the bottle again.
Personally, I think that the limiting hours aspect of this makes sense, but I’m less keen on the pre-track limits as it just makes the whole offering a bit too complicated from a consumer point of view – I can see the 10hr limit making people upgrade, but the per-track limit making people just listen to something else.
Visit ➔The often-rumored Apple HDTV
I’m wrong a lot whenever I speak in absolutes about Apple’s future plans, but I don’t think they’ll ever release a TV.
I think, for all the reasons Marco lists, that Apple will enter the TV market. It’s fractured, difficult and confusing for the consumer – it reminds me exactly of the pre-iPhone mobile phone market. And the pre-iPod market. And the pre-iPad market.
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