David Emery OnlineplasticbagUK: Books are indulgent...
Books are indulgent, wasteful, bad for the environment, burdens, are bought for display and have nothing to do with a love of reading.
Quoted for truth.
Reading does not mean reading books.
Listening to music does not mean playing a CD or record.
If you associate the two together so be it, but they’re not one and the same thing.
Visit ➔typeface.js
Instead of creating images or using flash just to show your site’s graphic text in the font you want, you can use typeface.js and write in plain HTML and CSS, just as if your visitors had the font installed locally. This is a work in progress, but functional enough at least to render the the graphic text on this site.
Looks like it be a viable alternative to sIFR, and seems to load a bit quicker too.
Visit ➔AC/DC Music Video Distributed as Excel Spreadsheet
They decided on this unusual format because they wanted the video to penetrate even the most Draconian corporate firewalls. After all, who can’t receive an Excel spreadsheet?
Obviously a gimmick, but quite an amusing one.
Visit ➔4ad Audio Player
To match the Rough Trade audio player, we’ve just launched one for the 4ad site. It’s currently got 3 of the best tracks released this year on it, all available as MP3s and all well worth listening to:
Visit ➔Huffduffer
Using the service is pretty straightforward. First of all, you have to sign up. No, I haven’t implemented OpenID support. Sorry. I hope to get around to it at some stage.
Secondly, you find MP3 files out there on the web. Using either a bookmarklet, or a form on the site itself, you “huffduff” the file: give it a title, description, and tags.
That’s pretty much it. People can subscribe to your podcast and you can subscribe to other people’s podcasts. You can also subscribe to a podcast of files with a certain tag or a combination of files from a particular person with a particular tag. Basically, if there’s a page for it on the site, there’s probably a corresponding podcast you can subscribe to.
Very nice way of automatically creating a podcast feed out of MP3s you find on the web – think Delicious but just for audio. Perfect for micro-mp3 blogging – I think I’ll integrate my Huffduffer feed into this main blog feed when I get a chance…
More info on Jeremy’s Blog.
Visit ➔Reflections on the new MacBook Pro
I love almost everything about the new MacBook Pros. The new “unibody” case, carved out of a single piece of aluminum, is a stunning achievement, making the device feel both light and solid. The new “no button” trackpad is brilliant. Use it once and you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. The machine, from top to bottom, is the most elegant, powerful, perfect laptop I’ve ever touched.
And then they ruined the whole thing by hiding the display behind a mirror.
People seem to be up in arms* about the lack of a matte display option on the new MacBooks (which look great, in my opinion), citing all sorts of things like ‘colour reproduction’ and reflections meaning you couldn’t ever possibly use these computers for professional work. (As an aside, this is a commendable debating tactic: “Oh, you don’t mind the new displays? You obviously aren’t as professional and skilled as me, then”.)
How, then, did we survive all those years using CRT displays – which I’m still told are better for colour reproduction – which are all glossy? We didn’t seem to have a problem with it then…
* As in ‘people on the internet’, which means about 10 people in reality…
Visit ➔But It's Not Flash...
So… We’re launched, and starting to make the blog rounds and the site is receiving a tremendous amount of criticism for being in Flash. This post is to address the comments we are hearing. I’ll try to make them a running list, updated as we hear feedback.
I love the way they have a big list of standard html features that the plan to develop for their flash-based blog; way to make the point for us, guys…
Visit ➔An industry with a great future behind it
Sister Ray Records in London… was my favourite record store in the capital. Or at least – I thought it was. In fact, Sister Ray was not my favourite record shop because I liked Sister Ray. It was my favourite record shop because it fitted a romantic, nostalgic notion about London independent record shops.
Great article, and I firmly agree – small indie record shops are great in theory but less so in practice. However, I do quite like the new Rough Trade East although it’s telling that I’ve never bought anything there – I like it for the instores…
Visit ➔NIN Edition of Tap Tap Revenge
In what may well stand as a defining moment in the maturation of Apple’s App Store, Tapulous has announced that it has partnered with the band Nine Inch Nails to release a premium version of its popular game Tap Tap Revenge some time in October.
I find it quite interesting that this NIN version of Tap Tap Revenge will be a premium version, considering that the normal version is free (and has been very successful).
I’ve been thinking a lot about the pricing models of music related iPhone apps recently – it’s the traditional ‘free, but with promotional value’ versus ‘monetized, but with less promotional value’ debate that music videos also have to face. My general conclusion is that the ‘free with promo’ option is probably the best to go for – if the game you are in is selling music then the surrounding content you generate that isn’t part of the body of work (like you could argue a music video is) should be seen as promotional value only, there to increase music sales.
That being said, if the content you create is compelling enough in its own right then it seems reasonable to think about charging for it, but then is that worth the development time and resources? This NIN/Tapulous deal seems like a nice bridge between the two, although I think it would have made far more sense to have the NIN version free – with the value being in increased music sales – and the normal version for-pay.
Visit ➔YouTube - experiencewii's Channel
To explain it would be to ruin it, but this is a masterful piece of online advertising for the new Wii Wario game (which sadly I’ve heard isn’t that good).
Visit ➔Radiohead Reckoner Remix
We’ve just launched the second Radiohead Remix project, this time with Reckoner (which I think will be a hell of a lot easier to remix then Nude was).
Visit ➔Bandcamp - A free hosted CMS for bands that (hopefully) doesn't suck
Most of the time, these products are poorly built, poorly customizeable and then want to charge artists money (for these amazing services). Bandcamp seems simple, easy to use and free, though they do have some plans to make money.
It’s amazing how many of these type of products there are out there, and still not one I’d choose to use. Bandcamp seems better then most, but only does the ‘music’ bit (playing/downloading/purchasing) for the time being and in all honesty ecommerce from a small band’s site generally isn’t worth the time and effort (not enough sales and you have to do all the promotion yourself).
Visit ➔CrossOver Chromium
CrossOver Chromium is a Mac and Linux port of the open source Chromium web browser. CrossOver Chromium is available for download from CodeWeavers, free of charge.
Seems to work surprisingly well – good enough at least to do a double check that everything that works ok in Safari works in Chrome.
Visit ➔Best Buy eyes Apple, Microsoft with Napster purchase
Today, electronics retailer Best Buy announced that it would buy Napster for a total of $121 million, a significant premium over the company’s value based on either stock price or assets.
“Hi there! We’re Best Buy.
We know nothing about digital music.
No, seriously – absolutely nothing. Not a clue.”
It’s almost like they’re trying to prove how stupid they are – Napster is a company loosing customers hand-over-fist as its main subscription business has unsurprisingly turned out to be a failure. The brand only has recognition from its illustrious illegal past and subsequent appalling advertising.
I don’t get it.
Visit ➔App Store: I’m out.
I will never write another iPhone application for the App Store as currently constituted.
Writing software is a serious investment of time and energy. It also carries the opportunity cost of the other things you could have built. We live in a capitalist economy. Under capitalism, profit is the reward for economic risk. Without a reasonable expectation of profit, the sensible business-person will not invest. Without investment and risk-taking, there is no innovation.
Apple’s current practice of rejecting certain applications at the final hurdle – submission to the App Store – is disastrous for investor confidence. Developers are investing time and resources in the App Store marketplace and, if developers aren’t confident, they won’t invest in it. If developers – and serious developers at that – don’t invest, what’s the point?
I’m very concerned with the policy Apple is adopting with the approval process on the App Store – sure, the ‘I Am Rich’ fiasco made sense (it surely was causing problems with some users accidently buying it) but arbitrarily banning apps destroys developer confidence.
On the plus side, the backlash has been so widespread that I can’t help but think they’ll change their policies – they pretty much have to at this point.
Visit ➔The labels that turned the tables
Once upon a time, the major labels were king. They swept up sales in their velvety cloaks, showered money from the heavens, and defined the way you and I bought music. Now they’re shedding staff, dropping bands and losing their star names. Now the drivers of the record industry are small, maverick labels that define trends and launch careers. Some of them even sell records by the lorryload. And this autumn sees a spate of anniversaries in which these powerhouses of British music are celebrating their achievements.
Nice article on our little corner of the industry…
Visit ➔EA Announces SimCity and The Sims 3 for the iPhone
EA has announced that nine new titles are currently in development for the iPhone: Yahtzee Adventures, EA Mini Golf, Lemonade Tycoon, Mahjong, Monopoly: Here & Now The World Edition, SimCity, Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 09, Need for Speed Undercover, and The Sims 3.
I am very excited by the prospect of SimCity for the iPhone – if they get it right it could be the perfect iPhone app.
Visit ➔First Look at Cappuccino and Objective-J
The executive summary is that Cappuccino is re-implementation of many of the basic parts of Cocoa, and Objective-J is a language which looks nearly identical to Objective-C and “compiles down” into JavaScript. You can also use JavaScript right inline with Objective-J, similar to how you can use C in Objective-C.
This looks very impressive, and can certainly make interesting looking apps but I’m really not comfortable working so abstracted away from the real code. Coding javascript, html and css well in a cross-browser way is hard and I’m not convinced that 280 North will have solved every problem and bug inherent in the medium.
What do you if your code is right but it doesn’t work? You’re so far away from the actual code you’ve got no chance.
I’m also still not convinced by web sites pretending to be desktop applications – they’re not, and the most successful ones (like Flickr and Gmail) don’t pretend to be.
Visit ➔