David Emery OnlineIs This Really The Future of Magazines or Why Didn’t They Just Use HTML 5?
However, what strikes me most about the Wired app is how amazingly similar it is to a multimedia CD-ROM from the 1990’s. This is not a compliment and actually turns out to be a fairly large problem…
I’m a fan of the Wired app – more on that soon – but its construction (lots of .pngs with some XML glue) seems woefully inefficient.
Visit ➔How The UK Times’ New Paid Website Will Look
While I’m a long way from being convinced that the paywall is an idea that’s good, or that it’ll work, this redesign – going from these screengrabs – looks like it’s actually a pretty good one.
Visit ➔Leave Britney Alone! (Where by Britney I mean Steve, Mark and Jimbo)
The problem here is one of perspective. We hardcore internet users might do well to realise that, just because we spend our days trawling TechCrunch and TechMeme and Hacker News doesn’t mean that the wider world shares our belief that privacy settings for photos we’ve chosen to post online, Flash on the iPad or our God-given right to see erections on Wikipedia are the most important issues in the world today.
I’m beginning to link to every column Paul Carr writes for TechCrunch, because he’s the only one in the tech media that seems to have any sense of perspective.
Don’t agree with Apple’s App Store policies? Don’t buy an iPhone.
Don’t agree with Facebook’s privacy policies? Don’t use Facebook.
It’s not difficult.
Visit ➔Six Degrees of Black Sabbath
Find the path that connects two artists
I think it’s impossible to go to this site and not get sucked in for at least 10 minutes.
Visit ➔On Turning The Page
Just let me scroll, please? I’ve been reading stuff off the screen seriously for what, 15 years? More? Scrolling is fine, you know.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the whole “pages versus scrolling” thing and I have to say I’m veering towards – at least on touch-based devices – pages being preferable. On the desktop, with scroll-wheel mice, scrolling works well but the incessant “swipe, swipe, swipe” method on mobile devices is pretty tiresome – especially as commonly there’s no quick way of jumping ahead like there is in a regular scrolling environment (which is one of the key benefits of scrolling).
Visit ➔Facebook Breached My Privacy, And Other Things That Whiny, Entitled Dipshits Say
In other words, their problem is not that something ended up online, simply that they were unable to keep control of something they willingly shared with at least a portion of the world. And it’s that attitude that needs to change – from one of retroactive bleating about privacy to one of proactive filtering of what we choose to share in the first place.
Blaming Facebook’s flaky approach to privacy for the ills of the exhibitionist generation is just yelling at the stable door, long after the horse has bolted.
Surprisingly for something on TechCrunch, this article is right on the money. I appreciate that, judging by the amount of people on Twitter* that seem to hate Facebook, I may be in a minority in my peer group but I have no problem with Facebook, and a fairly relaxed attitude to online privacy.
The key to me is just to assume that everyone can read or view anything you put on the internet, wherever that is, and act accordingly. It's the internet: you don't have any control, so don't worry about it.
* Most of which have public Twitter streams, Just sayin'.
Visit ➔Scribd CTO: “We Are Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5″
Tomorrow, online document sharing site Scribd will start to ditch Flash across its tens of millions of uploaded documents and convert them all to native HTML5 Web pages. Not only will these documents look great on the iPad’s no-Flash browser, but it will bring the richness of fonts and graphics from documents to native Web pages.
Impressive stuff – I’m interested to see what the markup is going to be like (I’ve never seen a machine write good markup).
Visit ➔Indie music mogul: The net's great for us
You read the industry is 60 per cent of the size it was ten years ago. But that 40 per cent that has gone is almost entirely the cream at the top. Records that sold two million now sell 500,000 - that's where that's gone. At the same time it's easier to sell those slightly smaller levels. [...] 99 per cent of what you hear about artists who can survive on their own playing live is crap. It's recorded music that drives success in other areas. Something like Enter Shikari was clearly a contrary example, and Mumford and Sons are something of an exception too - they built a large live following before putting out records - but there are very few exceptions.
A great read, and dead on the money (of course I would say that, as Martin’s my boss).
Visit ➔Pitchfork.tv: The National - Terrible Love
The Brooklyn rockers bring their big sound to an abandoned castle overlooking New York's Hudson river.
This track is just astonishingly good live:
Visit ➔Understand The Web
Perceptions of the web is changing. People are advocating that we treat the web like another application framework. An open, cross-platform, multi-device rival to Flash and Cocoa and everything else. I’m all for making the web richer, and exposing new functionality, but I value what makes the web weblike much, much more.
A must-read article on the state of the web today; I could quote practically every paragraph.
I remember a while back Khoi Vinh lamented that there are no ‘masterpieces’ on the web; no culture-defining works that will last the test of time. I’m sure he was referring to design when he wrote it (the particular post escapes me), but that’s a fallacy that touches on the same points made in this article; the web isn’t like print graphic design, just like TV isn’t like theatre or photography isn’t like painting. The same is true of the web and applications – they’re similar but different mediums.
I’d argue that YouTube is a masterpiece just as much as the Mona Lisa or 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a totally different kind of thing, and that’s the whole point.
Visit ➔HP buys Palm
HP has just announced that it's acquiring Palm to the tune of $1.2 billion, which works out to $5.70 per share of Palm common stock. The deal is planned to close by July 31, which marks the end of HP's third fiscal quarter of the year. Current Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein is "expected to remain with the company,"
A very smart move for HP; they can’t be happy being shackled to Microsoft for operating systems and WebOS is a great OS in the making.
Interesting also that this comes the day that the Apple WWDC is announced, which for the first time has abandoned having a Mac app design award, instead focusing on iPhone and iPad awards instead. Mobile OSs are the future – both Apple and HP know it.
Visit ➔Spotify Goes Social
In its newest app update, and the biggest since launch in 2008, Spotify users will now be able to connect to their Facebook page and import friends from their profile who are also registered Spotify users. Connected friends will become visible in the Spotify browser, and this opens up a whole new landscape of interaction and activity which can now be published simultaneously to users’ Facebook profiles and within the Spotify browser in the new feed section.
The social features in the new version of Spotify are pretty nifty – I already know plenty of people that share playlists so this is a perfect enhancement to current user behaviour.
What’s far more interesting – at least from my point of view – in this update though is the ability for Spotify to play, store and manage local files. At the moment I pretty much don’t use Spotify because the large proportion of music I listen to isn’t on there (music from blogs, pre-release albums etc), so this new feature makes it a lot more attractive.
If I didn’t have to pay £10/month for the iPhone app I’d ditch iTunes…
Visit ➔M.I.A. - Born Free
Director : Romain Gavras
This is one of the best videos I’ve ever had the fortune of working with (although please note, it’s very NSFW and not for the faint hearted):
This is what happens when you make videos for the internet, not for the TV – it doesn’t need to be lo-fi, cheap and easy. If anything, it can be better.
Visit ➔British recorded music sales rise for the first time in six years
Record labels, which have faced a slump in CD sales and a long-running battle against internet piracy, experienced a rise in income from music sales from £916 million to £929 million in 2009, the British Phonographic Industry said.
The surprise increase marks the first time that the growth in income from digital services such as iTunes has outweighed the decline from sales of CDs. Income from digital singles and albums leapt by 53 per cent, to £154 million, while physical formats dropped 6 per cent to £740 million.
Yep, sure looks like the recorded music industry is dying, doesn’t it?
In a slightly less flippant way, what this article really shows is the pointlessness of looking at overall industry figures like this; acts like Susan Boyle and Lady Gaga skew the figures massively and hence obscure how the majority of the industry is doing. And a lot of it is doing alright, and has been doing alright throughout the ‘downturn’.
Visit ➔Why All Those Records (Gaslight Anthem, Crystal Castles, Hole, Etc.) Leaked On Monday
Because PlayMPE--"one of a handful of technologies that record labels use to distribute advance, watermarked albums, to blogs, magazines, and a variety of other publications," reports AbsolutePunk.net--was hacked last week. PlayMPE is the preferred industry vehicle these days as far getting records to critics ahead of the official release date. But all it took was one clever teenager to get himself on the company's distribution list, and the rest was RapidShare history.
Ouch.
Visit ➔Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch
This clip is raw from Camera E-8 on the launch umbilical tower/mobile launch program of Apollo 11, July 16, 1969. [...] The camera is running at 500 fps, making the total clip of over 8 minutes represent just 30 seconds of actual time.
Awesome (in the true meaning of the word):
Visit ➔Design reset
It’s pretty clear this new fangled iPad is a reset in personal computing. I really hope this “reset” echoes throughout the web design community. The best example I’ve seen is from the New York Times.
The iPad has revealed a great deal when it comes to the design of websites. The app store is now full of apps that provide a nicer interface to a web app or site, but most of them don’t actually do anything that couldn’t be done on the web.
The New York Times app is a great example – it’s far nicer to read an article on it when compared to the website (which is full of clutter and visual noise). Now, obviously there’s some features that are iPad (or more specifically touch-interface) specific but there’s a lot that can be learnt in this space I think.
Also, on a similar note:
It seems that more and more Apps are replacing websites in a time when more and more applications are moving to the web. What exactly do we want? Email went from the Application to the Cloud with Gmail, and we love it. The same for Flickr for photos and Google Docs for documents. At the same time Twitter started out as a website but quickly moved to applications on multiple platforms. It is clear that just moving everything to the web isn’t the ultimate solution for everything. That eBay and IMDB app are clear examples.
Now, I don’t believe apps are the ‘death of the website’ as that’s obviously link-baiting hyperbole but there’s a kernel of truth in there…
Visit ➔LCD Soundsystem - Drunk Girls
"Drunk Girls" - taken from the new album "This is Happening" directed by Spike Lee
I never trusted pandas:
Visit ➔The Firefox 4 Download Manager
Alexander Limi elaborates on how Mozilla plans to improve the download manager in Firefox 4:
I wondered how long it would take for iPad UI elements (in this case pop-overs) to make their way over to the desktop. Answer: not very long.
Visit ➔