David Emery OnlineFix Outlook
Microsoft have confirmed they plan on using the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010. This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more. […] Let’s use Twitter to send a clear message to Microsoft.
The campaign itself I’m not too fussed by (although we do send HTML emails at work, but if those emails don’t look nice in Outlook – and they work in Gmail/Hotmail – then that’s Outlook’s problem), but the site itself is pretty nifty with its real-time aggregation of Tweets. It reminds me of what we did on the Albert Hammond Jr. site, although doing via Twitter is pretty cool and something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now (probably using Twivatar just to make it easy).
(Via Ben Ward)
Visit ➔Folding Plug
This is mighty clever; the only plug I ever actually carry is my MacBook plug so if Apple would buy this and integrate into their cables asap that would be lovely…
Visit ➔Nearby on Your Phone
We’ve always liked the idea of showing you photos taken in a particular place […] Today we’re bringing that ability to the smartphone mobile site. For those devices that support it (currently Android and the iPhone with the new 3.0 software), the Mobile Nearby page will figure out where you are in the world and show you photos that have been taken in the same area.
I had forgotten that the version of Safari that ships with iPhone OS 3 has location services built in, which is pretty darn awesome. Location services are the next big thing, and this is one of the key enablers.
Visit ➔Fever° Red hot. Well read.
Your current feed reader is full of unread items. You’re hesitant to subscribe to any more feeds because you can’t keep up with your existing subs. Maybe you’ve even abandoned feeds altogether. Fever takes the temperature of your slice of the web and shows you what’s hot.
I’ve been waiting for Fever for a while now as I’m very much still in a RSS reader wilderness, and Bloglines is definitely getting worse not better. Sadly though Fever doesn’t quite look like what I’m after, although it does look beautiful – I’m not too interested in the ‘Fever’ Digg-style personal recommendation thing, and the rest of the reading experience looks like it’s not quite what I’m looking for (see the link above for my rather particular feature set I’m after).
However, I’m not 100% sure that it’s not what I’m after but I can’t tell as there’s no live demo, and there’s no way I’m going to put down $30 without having a go first. I have absolutely no problem with adopting a desktop-app style model (pay upfront and install yourself) for web software but a key part of that is being able to try it first. Can anyone who’s bought Fever tell me whether it meets the list of criteria here?
Seriously considering writing my own one at this point, but that’s probably more hassle then it’s worth…
Visit ➔Olympus E-P1
The first Micro Four Thirds camera from Olympus pays unabashed homage to the Pen F; from the classic styling to the long running teaser campaign running in print and online, the E-P1 doesn’t just wear its influences on its sleeve; it shouts about them from the rooftops (and is referred to in some parts of the world as the ‘Digital Pen’). There’s even a subtle engraving on the chrome edge of the top plate that reads ‘Olympus Pen Since 1959’.
Like I really need another camera. Thanks guys.
Visit ➔Discovery
We’ve just launched this little one-page site for Discovery, the new project by members of Vampire Weekend and Ra Ra Riot. It’s great – I think (unless something else comes along) it’s the sound of the summer for me.
Also, look out for some mildly interesting js-based scaling and layout on the site, keeping everything in check.
Visit ➔Fanfarlo - Reservoir for $1
Widget removed as it was set to auto-play – not cool, guys…
As regular readers will know I’m a fan of Fanfarlo, and their debut album Reservoir is a brilliant piece of work (for the lazy/NME journalist in you: think Arcade Fire meets Beirut. Ish). If you haven’t picked it up already, you now have no excuse – they’re selling it for $1 (with some extra tracks to boot!).
Go now, it will be the best $1 (62p!) you’ve spent all year.
Visit ➔The New Jack Penate Website
At work we’ve just launched the new site for Jack Peñate, which features all kinds of jParallax-based crazy scrolling flowers.
Really happy with the way this one turned out…
Visit ➔SoundCloud’s Terms and Conditions - Are they fair and reasonable ?
Have you read SoundCloud’s Terms and Conditions ? Did you know that by signing up, you grant them (and their successors) the right to do almost anything they like with your music? For free? Forever?
The article goes on to say how they’re sure that SoundCloud aren’t going to do anything nasty with their your content, and I agree but that really misses the point; what happens – and this isn’t too far fetched – if SoundCloud gets bought up by someone who has lesser morals? The T&Cs are quite clear – they could do almost anything they like with your content.
This isn’t a problem unique to SoundCloud either – web darlings Vimeo and ustream.tv both have similar conditions in their T&Cs. This is the really boring side of working on the edge of developing technologies, but in the long run do you really want some little web startup owning your content?
Visit ➔Introducing Typekit
That’s where Typekit comes in. We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.
This sounds great in theory. They are promising magic however, so I will believe it when I see it. Also, it looks like they might be relying on @font-face which really doesn’t have enough browser support at this time. Hopefully they’ve solved all these problem, though…
Visit ➔Palm Pre syncs with iTunes on a Mac just like an iPhone
“Plug a Pre into a Mac and it syncs, seamlessly, with Apple’s iTunes,” the financial publication reports. “In fact, the iTunes Store treats the Pre just as it would an iPod or an iPhone with one exception: it can’t handle old copy-protected songs.”
This is smart. Very smart. The Pre is the first credible contender to the iPhone, but the first thing that went through my head was ‘what about my music?’. Don’t forget that half of the success of the iPod is down to iTunes and the ease of use when it comes to device management it brings with it. I would assume though that if the Pre turns out to be a serious threat – personally I think there’s room for the both of them – Apple will make it start not working.
Visit ➔Spotify Music App for Android
If I were Steve Jobs, the video to the right would scare me senseless. It shows a Google Android phone running a Spotify app that appears to succeed in porting the full Spotify experience — still not available to most Americans – to a mobile phone.
On the contrary – I think the reason that we’ve seen this running on an Android based phone is that the iPhone app is embargoed until the WWDC keynote in a week and a half’s time, where it’ll get some stage time. Don’t forget that Apple has been featuring the Last.fm app – which has similar streaming music capabilities – on its TV adverts. A Spotify app is a great addition to the app store.
Visit ➔Looking for a Web Developer
We are looking for a talented and enthusiastic developer to join our in-house web development team, to develop and build upon our suite of online internal business systems and to code and build artists and label web sites. The role will work alongside our web developers specialising in the back-end technical development of wide and interesting range of sites and tools.
Required skills:
• Strong PHP
• Strong MySQL
• Semantic HTML
• Javascript
• CSS
We are hiring again at work, so if you’re a web dev in London and would like to work with bands like Radiohead, Jarvis, Sonic Youth, Bon Iver and many many more get in touch.
Visit ➔Dizzee Rascal Driving U.K. 'Bonkers'
Dizzee Rascal is set to score a big-selling No. 1 single in the U.K. on Sunday (May 24) with “Bonkers” (Dirtee Stank), his collaboration with DJ and producer Armand Van Helden.
…and it’s self released on his own label. Who says indie record labels are a dying breed? There’s still plenty of money to be made selling recording music, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise (just don’t count on selling as much as Dizzee).
Visit ➔Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS
When I asked myself why people visit my sites, and the ones that I make for other people, the answer was always “for the content”. Content that is almost always written words and that means type.
That is why I’m now advocating to my clients (and to you), that where feasible, not to waste hours in time and a client’s money on lengthy workarounds in an unnecessary attempt at cross-browser perfection. Instead, you and I should provide simple but effectively designed HTML elements. This means just great typography for headings, paragraphs, quotations, lists, tables and forms and no styling of layout.
A great idea, I think – come up with one stylesheet just for IE6 that completely ignores layout, backgrounds etc and focuses on making the page content look nice (albeit simple). We’ve stopped supporting IE6 on the sites we make now as the user % has dropped below 5% (finally!) but it would be nice to easily give those 5% something that works and is easy to read, so this fits the bill quite nicely.
Visit ➔Twitter - An application would like to connect to your account
Why on earth would I want universalmusic.com (I was signing in to Eminem.com) to be able to update my information on Twitter?!
At the very least make sure you have it coming up as the artist, as opposed to the big corp name, but also why are they asking for so much access? Of course, it’s because they really do want to spam your twitter given half the chance, which is why I’m inherently untrusting about using Twitter as a 3rd party site log-in system. My Twitter account is too important to be giving out to people willy-nilly, I might as well be logging in using my email account details…
Visit ➔'Photoshop Handsome' by Everything Everything
This is pretty darn awesome, in all sorts of ways:
Via Abeano.
Visit ➔How to send the perfect HTML e-mail
Why? Well, an e-mail is not a webpage. A webpage is on the web. It’s viewed by a web browser. An e-mail gets displayed in a mail user agent (MUA). E-mails get indexed by software that is calibrated for coping with text/plain. The point of HTML is that it’s a representation format for hypertext documents. I have yet to see an e-mail that wouldn’t be better as text/plain. And, yes, other people disagree. I don’t particularly give a shit. E-mail means text/plain.
I used to agree with the whole ‘html emails are evil‘ schtick until I realised that there’s actually no good reasoning to back up that viewpoint whatsoever (it was – of course – at the point where I had to justify my ‘emails we send have to be in plain text’ in a work related context).
Other then the faintly religious ‘html email is bad cos we say so’ argument, what exactly is wrong with it?
We wouldn’t argue that web pages should be plain text, would we? I fail to see how this is different considering the proliferation of html supporting email clients, and surely no-one is really arguing that we shouldn’t be able to use such basic things as headings, bold and italics? Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of bad html email out there but that doesn’t mean the medium itself is bad.
Visit ➔Shifting my Opinion on CSS Animations
Having actually taken some time to implement CSS animations in an example, a light bulb clicked. The way I looked at how animations were declared and in what situations you would declare them suddenly changed. I believe I have done a 180 on this.
CSS transitions are easily my most used piece of ‘new’ CSS, followed closely by text-shadow. It makes it so easy to add superfluous, non-essential but experience-enhancing touches of animation that I’d never have time to add via javascript. I use them on practically every site I build now – it would be great if other browsers (ok, I really mean Firefox realistically) would implement them as well.
Music is not like water
Well, it turns out every generation gets its own version of flying cars—a certain-sounding vision of future technology based on a vigorously embraced present technology, which passing time eventually reveals to be both laughable and impossible. At the end of the 21st century’s first decade, the internet seems particularly susceptible to the flying car syndrome, with all sorts of zippy schemes gaining traction within our net-addled culture.
With the music industry in conspicuous disarray, it’s no surprise to see flying cars promised as inexorable destiny. There are three particular models of flying car most prominently advertised these days by the music industry’s loudest and most insistent hucksters. These are: 1) The “Free Music” model […] 2) The “Access” model […] 3) The “Music-Like-Water” model.
A very interesting – albeit long – article on potential music revenue models. I’m not sure if I agree 100% with the conclusions – I imagine that most of these models will, while probably not becoming the dominant music consumption model, carve out a decent sized niche – but it’s well worth a read.
Visit ➔