David Emery Online

Open-washing and the Camel Open Circle …Jerk

Camel doesn’t really believe in openness — let alone grok the concept — let alone give a shit about openness — but since all the cool kids are doing it, they’re happy to co-opt the label to win points. Let the backfire begin.

At the height of cynicism, we have a company whose primary business is architecting new schemes to kill people with their death products, aligning their brand with “openness”. Consider the line crossed.

I don’t get how Camel – or their agency – thought that this work. ‘Open’ has jumped the shark quite thoroughly, although whether it was actually anything other then a pointless buzzword (see ’2.0’) is up for debate.

Textpattern Admin Themes

dds_admin_style is a Textpattern plugin that enables two features for the Textpattern Admin:
1. Select a style saved within Textpattern as the admin CSS.
2. Set a unique favicon for the admin.

A nice set of themes for the admin section of Textpattern – one of my current bugbears with Textpattern is how old-school the admin interface is (along with the lack of rich text controls) and this solves that problem nicely.

Also, check out David DeSandro’s site – who made the plugin – as well; it’s very nice.

Pitchfork Redesigns

Obviously nicer then their previous old-school design, but it’s all a little generic, isn’t it? Take away the logo and you’d have no clue that it’s Pitchfork – it looks like a slightly inferior Drowned In Sound.

Also, they’ve taken the nicely designed pitchfork.tv and genericised that too, taking their embeded video player – which was my favourite embeded video player, due to its simplicity (yes, I have favourite embeded video players…) – and ruining it in the process (it even autoplays if you embed it!). Oh well…

Fun with Augmented Reality

Love this Mini augmented reality ad:

Feels like there’s some really cool things you could do with this technology, now that it’s hitting the mainstream.

"I never felt magic crazy as this..."

I spent a large chunk of Tuesday in a car with a friend driving up to Manchester. He and I were at the University there in the 80s and we were driving up to spec out a project for later this year. He’s a record exec (of course! which of your so-called friends aren’t? I hear you crow). His job requires him to be constantly in contact with people who work with and for him and so I sat in the passenger listening to his speakerphone conversations: lawyers telling him how he was “their guy” and how and they honestly wanted to sign to him, American executives telling him how genuinely excited about their projects they were , new employees telling him how sincerely they were looking forward to their job… It was a veritable sea of love and sincerity. It reminded of my A&R days and how so much of what got people out of bed depended on passion.

Not linked to for any massive ‘point’ that it makes, but because it’s just a nice read.

Also, I feel duty bound to point out that Adele isn’t on a major, and doesn’t have wads of cash behind her (well, she does now but that’s because she’s earned it).

Kindle on iPhone

• No Kindle required
• Get the best reading experience available on your iPhone or iPod touch
• Access your Kindle books even if you don’t have your Kindle with you
• Automatically synchronizes your last page read between devices with Amazon Whispersync

It’s clear the Amazon means business with their online book store – they know that they’re not really cut out to be hardware manufacturer (although it’s obviously a nice side line). Their key strength is as an online retailer of content, and they obviously want to become the dominant force in this area (much like Apple with the iTunes Store). It wouldn’t surprise me if further down the road we see some kind of more formal Apple – Amazon hook up on this front (with books in the iTunes Store).

A real shame it’s not available outside the US though; I assume that – much like with the music industry – all the deals to provide content need to be done on a region-by-region basis.

Skittles.com

Obviously a massive reference to Modernista but I quite like simplicity of this – it’s not as though anyone is really that interested in a Skittles website, quite frankly, but they need to have one and this is a good compromise. Borne of similar thinking to the XL Recordings site, I imagine (which I should probably add some form of Twitter conversation tracking to…).

Visa 'flow' TV ad

Compare and contrast:

Visa Advert:

Rjd2 – Work It Out Video:

The Big Pink: Velvet

This is the most exciting new song I’ve heard in so very long; The Big Pink are – finally – a proper, interesting, innovative British band, which it feels like we haven’t seen in ages:

Play it again and again and again until it gets under your skin.

Cappuccino is not designed for building web sites

Them: With Cappuccino, you don’t need to know HTML. You’ll never write a line of CSS. You don’t ever have interact with DOM.

Ben: Everything that’s wrong about Cappuccino, quoted from their own about page. I actually get angry about this.

Ben has hit the nail on the head here. Cappuccino and the new Atlas IDE are both very impressive feats of coding, but are based on completely faulty thinking. I haven’t used a ‘web app’ that behaves like a desktop app that I like – look at Gmail, Flickr, Facebook et al – and I’m not sure why anybody (other then desktop application developers) would think it’s a good idea.

Spotify is a good example – there are quite a few competitors with similar offerings – iMeem, We7 etc – but because they’re a desktop app the user experience is so much better. Some things should be in the browser, some things shouldn’t.

And don’t get me started on the whole “you don’t need to know html/css/js” malarky – it’s akin to calling yourself a graphic designer and using PowerPoint and clipart.

OmniWeb and three other Omni apps set free

The Omni Group, those loveable guys behind OmniWeb, has announced that it’s setting free four of its previously for-pay Mac applications. As of today, OmniDazzle, OmniDiskSweeper, OmniObjectMeter, and, of course, the Mac web browser with a cult-like following, OmniWeb, are now free to the public, fully-functioning and sans license. […] “By making these applications—which are not currently under active development—available as free downloads, we hope that more people are able to enjoy using them without the barrier of cost.”

The timing of this is rather interesting – I switched from OmniWeb to the new Safari 4 beta (which is very good so far) today. I’m a big OmniWeb fan – it offers so many compelling features – but it’s in serious need of some work done to it as it’s falling behind Safari, Firefox and (soon on the Mac) Google Chrome. Safari 4 runs rings around it in terms of speed and UI, but it still lacks some of the OmniWeb power features like visual tabs (although you can get a slightly worse implementation in SafariStand), Workspaces and Zoomable text areas.

Cufon

Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set:

• No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client
• Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market
• Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases
• Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text

And now, after nearly a year of planning and research we believe that these requirements have been met.

This looks very promising – it’s so much faster then sIFR (which I reluctantly use here) – to the extent it’s as fast as real text is to load. All the need to do is support :hover states for links and I’ll switch wholesale.

End Game: Spotify on the iPhone

Spotify, the cloud-based music service whose catalog includes all of the major labels and lots of indies, is coming soon to the iPhone. […] This is all assuming that Apple/AT&T and other wireless gatekeepers permit the service. Apple has been notoriously resistant to the idea of music subscriptions.

I don’t see why Apple would refuse a potential Spotify app considering they have not only accepted the Last.fm app – which does similar things – they’re using it on their TV ads. However, with the state of wireless connectivity the way it is at the moment – in central London at least – I’m not going to get too excited just yet. I’ve had a go at using assorted streaming music apps on my iPhone and unless you have access to WiFi for at least some of the time they don’t well enough to get mass adoption. Most people aren’t going put up with long buffer times and drop outs half way through songs.

On a slightly unrelated note I find it very strange that in the Spotify desktop app (and replicated in the forthcoming iPhone app) there’s no way to ‘browse’ the music, only to search. I pretty much live in the browse mode in iTunes, and it seems like a much more natural way of getting round a large music catalogue – typically when I’m faced with a new Spotify window I get paralysed by choice; I know there’s practically everything there, so instantly I can’t remember one band I want to listen to to type in the search box.

Save The Music Fan

The music market is down not due to P2P “piracy,” but for four simple reasons: a) stiff competition for the entertainment dollar with formats like video games and movies, both have much larger marketing spends; b) the replacement cycle is over-digital music does not scratch or wear out like past formats; c) one now has the ability to purchase and listen only to the great songs without filler; and d) mass-merchant retailers today carry only the current hits, with little to no catalog.

I often disagree with Terry McBride – he focuses far to much on self promotion for my liking – but I think he’s dead on here.

Via Faßcinated

Super Furry Animals

We’ve just launched the new site for the Super Furry Animals. It’s not a full blown, all singing-all-dancing affair with lots of sections – instead, it’s a very focused site to promote their forthcoming album which is available on March 16th. Every day there’s going to be a new bit of video shot by them on 4 cameras from their studio – they’ve shot over 4 hours of footage that we’re going to put up one episode a day over the next few weeks.

And of course, on the web-dev tip, try resizing your window (finally figured out how to maxmise the size of the video without cropping)…

U2: New album preview – exclusively on Spotify

If you choose to listen to the U2 album exclusive listening party on Spotify, your email we will be shared with the Universal Music Group and U2’s management. UMG may then contact you to invite you to join the U2 Official Mailing List.

I don’t think this is a smart move on Spotify’s part. Sure, Universal will have made this mandatory for Spotify to get the exclusive but it now means that I don’t trust them with my details. It’s a very good way of pissing off your existing early-adopter user base.

Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?

Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?

No:

Hi from Last.fm, I’m one of the founders (and the original founder of audioscrobbler, the music tracking plugin).

I’m not going to write much right now because i’m rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue.

As far as I can tell, the author of this article got a “tip” from one person and decided to make a story out of it. Techcrunch is full of shit, film at 11.

Don’t believe anything you read on TechCrunch.

Looks Like Facebook Just Took The Top Spot Among Social Media Sites

This past December we reported on how Facebook was coming up on Blogger to steal its top spot among social media sites when measured by total unique visitors worldwide… Now, it appears as though Facebook has finally done it.

Facebook being big is hardly news. No, what’s interesting about this is if you take a look at the graph you’ll see that Flickr is pretty much even-stevens with Geocities.

Yes: Geocities.

The Wrong Kind of Breathtaking

This is just brilliant. The utter bollocks that traditionally comes hand in hand with professional design and art school is the reason why I originally decided not to go down that route (instead opting for this whole computer/internet malarky). I just can’t stand it.

The gravitational pull of Pepsi

I kind-of hope this is actually either a wind up or some misjudged marketing stunt.

CSS Animation

WebKit now supports explicit animations in CSS. As a counterpart to transitions, animations provide a way to declare repeating animated effects, with keyframes, completely in CSS.

Yet more nice improvements in WebKit, although I think they’re butting right up against the boundaries of what should be in CSS and what should be in javascript (not that there are elegant ways of doing this natively in javascript anyway).

What’s most impressive is that this is already supported on the iPhone, and the performance is exceptional – the leaves demo (which will only work in a recently nightly or on an iPhone) runs as smoothly on the iPhone as it does on my MacBook, but my MacBook uses 50% of its CPU while doing it…