David Emery OnlineHow Software Engineers and Designers Can Increase Their Focus
There’s a really simple tip almost everybody can use to increase productivity tremendously. Not only is the tip free, it might even make you a bit of money. *And* it’ll make you smarter. It’s really easy, there’s only one step involved: Sell your TVs.
I don’t get how anyone can fail to see that TV is one of the most important source of culture and knowledge we have.
Might as well be saying ‘sell all your books’ or ‘don’t listen to music’.
Visit ➔CSS transitions in Gecko
Current Firefox nightlies have support for the bleeding-edge CSS transitions specification. […] CSS transitions make it easy to smoothly animate changes to CSS styles, instead of changes taking effect instantly.
Great news! I don’t think there’s a site I’ve done in the last year that doesn’t feature some CSS transitions – which up till now have been Webkit only. I’m less thrilled though about having to add -moz duplicates for all of them though; not great having to write all this fancy new CSS3 4 times over (Webkit, Gecko, Opera and without prefix just in case).
Thinking For A Living
We took our website and turned it sideways. Why? Well, the site is for reading on screen, and I don’t know about you, but our screens are wider than they are tall. Putting text in columns makes it easier to read by providing a proper line length too. My eyes feel relieved already.
Well this is lovely isn’t it?
Love the horizontal, column-based layout – I tried to do this a few years ago with the To My Boy site (sadly offline now) but this is far nicer.
Visit ➔The Archives Update
Don’t worry RSS readers, I haven’t redesigned again – you can rest easy. However, my css-tourettes has finally paid some dividends.
I’m linking to myself here, to point out that I’ve updated my archives post which has all the assorted different designs this blog has had over the years. It’s interesting how badly the blog format deals with updated content like this, and also with posts that have a more long term appeal (rather then the slightly ephemeral, time specific nature mosts posts have) – not really sure what to do about it though, so linking to myself will have to suffice.
Eagle eyed readers will also spot that not only have I put version 9 of this blog in the archive, but version 9b as well – I couldn’t resist doing some tweaks to it, even though it hadn’t been up for barely two weeks…
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Subscriber Information and Revenue Sharing Seen as Hurdles to iPad Newspaper and Magazine Deals
Financial Times reports that talks between Apple and a number of newspaper and magazine publishers have encountered several hurdles that have slowed the deal-making process as the periodicals publishing industry attempts to understand how the move to digital distribution will affect its business.
One of the major concerns publishers are reportedly having pertains to Apple's policy of sharing only limited customer information with its content partners. As the report notes, publishers have long mined data on their subscribers in order to develop marketing efforts and evolve the focus of their publications over time, but Apple's reluctance to share that information is reportedly making publishers uneasy. […] Another concern for newspaper and magazine publishers is Apple's proposed revenue sharing arrangement, which involves Apple taking a 30% share of revenue for handling distribution.
Read: greed and cluelessness seen as hurdles to newspapers and magazines continuing to do business.
Visit ➔CSS Gradients For All Web Browsers, Without Using Images
The good news is that there is web browser support for CSS gradients in Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer (Opera will most likely add it soon too). The bad news is that, for a couple of reasons, the implementation in each web browser is different from the other.
I didn’t realise there was an IE filter for doing gradients as well – handy! I imagine there’s a performance hit though…
Visit ➔Scrobbling Timelines
Graphs are clearly Laurie’s raison d‘être, so it didn’t take me long to figure out that a great way of thanking him would be to write some code that does something we’ve been working towards for some time at Last.fm: generating personalized, real-time scrobbling history graphs.
I love graphs, me. Last.fm + graphs is hence a match made in heaven.
I know a lot of people use Last.fm for things like the recommended radio, forums and all that jazz but I use it solely for scrobbling and storing that data – what I played, when and how often. In fact, the more ways I could replicate the idea of scrobbling across other media the better; I’d love to scrobble watching films and TV (which technically could be done by Sky if they wanted), reading books and magazines (maybe on the iPad?) and all sorts of other things; in fact, it’s what interested me in Foursquare, which is pretty much scrobbling of location.
My scrobble graph can be found here.
Visit ➔iPad’s Killer App: It Looks A Bit Like A Magazine
But that won’t dishearten newspaper and magazine publishers. Because, for all the bluster about iPad “saving media”, their real iPad salvation is this: they can present their editions in much the same old dead-tree format they did before that pesky HTML came along.
“I believe the iPad will be about sitting in front of the TV whilst watching TV, browsing a ‘magazine’,” McCaffrey - whose 2ergo made the apps for The Guardian, Fox News, Arsenal FC and others - told me in an interview. “It will switch on in a second, you’ll be straight in to your content - it will be almost exactly like a magazine that you pick up from the coffee table.”
Yep, brilliant – that’s exactly what we need: glorified PDFs outputted by InDesign.
Bound to work out just fine that strategy. Just fine.
Visit ➔Wired for the iPad to Launch by Summer
Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson announced at the TED conference on Friday that the publication would be releasing its content for the iPad by summer.
[...]
“I’m from the media world,” Anderson told the audience “and as you may have heard, we have lots of questions about our future. The good news I think we found part of the answer…. We think this is a game changer.”
Back last month in the dark ages before the iPad had been unleashed upon the world I wrote a little article about what the possibilities the forthcoming tablet could hold, with a particular focus on eMagazines (or whatever we’re supposed to call them). The conclusion I got to (eventually) was that they just don’t really make any sense, so I was pretty eager to see what Apple was going to offer in that regard and how they made it make sense.
It turns out, of course, that they didn’t.
We got an eBook store – which we already know make sense – and a demo of a NY Times app (that did look lovely) but no proper official Apple solution; and you know if Apple thought it made sense, we would have got one. So, this Wired iPad app is undoubtedly the first announcement of many (there’s already quite a few for the iPhone, although none featuring in the Apps charts) but I’m not betting against Apple on this one…
Visit ➔Román Cortés and Ajaxian make up with amazing CSS demos
These effects are CSS level 1 and 2.1 only. There is no javascript, css3 or whatever, just html and css.
They are all based on the CSS 2D displacement map technique that Román Cortés discovered when he created the infamous CSS Coke Can effect.
The prism effect in particular is stunning – it’s nice to see that there’s still room for old school CSS hackery (although I can’t help but think you could do it way more easily using CSS3).
Visit ➔SublimeVideo HTML5 Video Player
HTML5 video goodness: no browser plugin, no Flash dependencies
I know a lot of people have linked to this already, but just in case you haven’t seen it yet this is well worth checking out. Obviously HTML5 video is not ready for prime time yet – Ogg is not a video format I’m going to encode in, so hence it only really works in Safari+Chrome – but when it is it’s good to know that not only will video playback be better then it currently is in flash, the user experience (read: slickness) will be as well.
Visit ➔MusicDNA Wants to Compete with Apple's iTunes LP Format - But Will Anybody Care?
MusicDNA, a new file format that looks a lot like Apple's iTunes LP format, wants to bring liner notes to the 21st century. MusicDNA is a new rich-media extension for digital music files that enriches songs and albums with additional data like lyrics,
I’m not super into the idea of these new ‘rich-media’ music formats – does anyone really want them? – but what I really don’t understand about either this or the rival CMX is where the hell people are supposed to buy these things from?
You’re certainly not going to be able to buy these things from iTunes (as they already have a rich-media format and have implemented it in the form of iTunes LP) and is it worth anybody’s time to make one of these things if you can’t sell them on the biggest music store?
Visit ➔Thesixtyone Unveils a Gorgeous Redesign, Users Predictably Revolt
Music discovery site thesixtyone unveiled a radical—and gorgeous—redesign a couple days ago. The redesign presents a single, lush full-screen photograph as each song plays, while smaller snapshots fade in and out screensaver-style. The controls are
Thesixtyone redesign certainly looks nice – obviously I’m a big fan of the full window photo thing (in fact my 2009 Top 20 was going to look just like that but I ran out of time). However, I agree with the ‘revolting’ users – it’s practically impossible to use now, and it feels like lots of functionality has been lost (I don’t know if it has or not, but it’s impossible to find things that used to be there).
Pretty and experimental is all well and good, but it needs to be useable too – see the way Hype Machine does it; the main site is super useable, but then they go and do cool, different things for their 2009 Zeitgeist alongside it.
Design and usability can be done at the same time – it’s not one or the other.
Visit ➔Apple’s Secret Cloud Strategy And Why Lala Is Critical
An upcoming major revision of iTunes will copy each user’s catalog to the net making it available from any browser or net connected ipod/touch/tablet. The Lala upload technology will be bundled into a future iTunes upgrade which will automatically be
I’d love this to be true, and I think it will be at some point in the near future. There’s no way though that Apple won’t charge for it, and probably charge a little bit too much, as is their wont. Would make sense as a killer feature to add to MobileMe (it would certainly make me signup).
Visit ➔Open Letter From OK Go
This week we released a new album, and it’s our best yet. We also released a new video – the second for this record – for a song called This Too Shall Pass, and you can watch it here. We hope you'll like it and comment on it and pass the link alo
I love the ridiculous situations this industry gets itself into sometimes, where it seemingly makes more sense to let people embed a video from other sites like Vimeo (who don’t even like having commercial videos on their platform, and hence have some slightly horrific clauses in their T&Cs that let them do far to much with your videos) rather then focus everyone on YouTube.
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Vampire Weekend - Contra
As part of the ongoing series of ‘things’ we’ve done for Vampire Weekend that I’ve written about previously we’ve just put up the album to stream on their website (and in handily embedable form below).
Luckily for all concerned it’s really rather good – I would say that though so have a listen and make you mind up for yourself:
Visit ➔Clever Mini promotion litters streets with giant packaging
I like this a lot – super simple but very effective.
Antacid Tablet
[…] It will most likely be based on web technologies, much like the iTunes LP format. Best case (but also the least likely), it’ll be a slightly incompatible extension of the ePub standard. Worst case (and most likely), it’ll be an entirely new format. Either way, like iTunes LP, the format will be publicly documented and there’ll be an SDK available to all interested parties…eventually.
I do hope that the (if it happens) format Apple uses for ebooks and emagazines (yuck – can’t think of what else to call them though) is HTML based. It does beg the question though of what the difference between a emagazine and a website is though – why would anyone buy one? I’m interested to see what Apple’s answer to that one is…
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