David Emery Online

Hi there, I’m David. This is my website. I work in music for Apple. You can find out a bit more about me here. On occasion I’ve been known to write a thing or two. Please drop me a line and say hello. Views mine not my employers.

Signup to receive the latest articles from de-online in your inbox:

Expression Engine vs Textpattern

Mr Hicks is pretty much on the money here, I think – Expression Engine is definitely more powerful then Textpattern, especially when it comes to things like users, but it’s just not as ‘nice’ to use.

Visit ➔

An Essential Dozen: 2008's best albums so far

I was considering posting a ‘albums of the year so far’ type post, but this pretty much covers it (bar a few exceptions, which I’m sure they’ll have in tomorrows follow up best). Not often you come across a music related list you wholly agree with…

Visit ➔

Firefox developers accelerate CSS implementation

Looks promising – the more browsers that implement CSS3 selectors and CSS Animations/Transforms the better.

Visit ➔

A New Day

A lovely redesign by Jason Santa Maria – makes me want to do yet another redesign (of course!). I’m very interested in this whole concept of per-article styling – bringing art direction into web design is very important I think; I’m itching to find a site that I can have a go at really mixing things up on and making all the content ‘unique’ from a design perspective.

Down with page templates!

Visit ➔

Introducing MagCloud and the Future of Magazine Publishing

I really like the idea of being able to self-publish a magazine – it’s a much more interesting concept to me then book self-publishing. Hopefully MagCloud will expand to the UK sooner rather then later as it looks like a very easy way of doing it.

Visit ➔

New BuddyPress Theme

I’m not generally a WordPress fan (it gets far too much hype), but this is looking very, very interesting – I’ve long been searching for a decent mini-social network platform and this could well be it.

Visit ➔

SAUSAGES

This is very silly in a wonderful way:

Visit ➔

OK Computer, Scanner, Dot Matrix Printer…

I assume that everyone reading this has probably seen the ‘Radiohead’s Nude played by old computer bits’ video already (although I’ve embedded it below just in case), but the ever-interesting Creative Review blog have just posted a nice little interview with its creator, James Houston.


Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Visit ➔

Wi-Fi on the iPhone. Frequently asked questions.

“O2 has partnered with The Cloud to provide you with unlimited access to over 7500 public Wi-Fi hotspots across the UK on your iPhone. Excessive usage policy applies.
From 11 July, you will also get access to 2000 Wi-Fi hotspots from BT Openzone.

Very nice – I’ve only managed to use ‘The Cloud’ once in the last 6 months of iPhone ownership, so having free BT Openzone access is a nice bonus.

Visit ➔

iPhone is now free on selected Pay Monthly tariffs

…and a free/£99 upgrade to existing O2 iPhone customers, which is a pretty great deal all round. Didn’t really expect to get a free new 3G iPhone out of this keynote…

Visit ➔

The Big Picture - Boston.com

Simple but perfect – a blog showcasing exceptional news photography, with nice and large photos.

Visit ➔

Versions - Mac Subversion Client

Finally a decent Mac Subversion client – I’ve been using it for the past couple of days and it seems to be really nice.

Visit ➔

Future Photoshop UI changes

I find it very frustrating that Adobe think they know best when it comes to creating interfaces, when they quite obviously don’t. Is it too much to ask to have native window controls?

Visit ➔

Design Rants

“I don’t really have a good fix for this one. I ran out of ideas, so no text expandability. But I feel really bad about that, so the guilt makes up for it, right? Right?”

Exactly my thinking when it comes to html/css – have a good go at making it work in the ideal, totally-semantic-markup + no javascript requirement + text-expandable way but sometimes it’s just not pragmatic. Of course, if your html is well written you can always turn off css to get at the content, but that’s hardly a good solution… oh the guilt.

Visit ➔

RelatedMail: The Semantic Web comes to Mail

A useful looking Mail.app plugin that finds related emails to the one you’re currently reading. It doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with the Semantic Web, though, which would be pretty nifty – how about showing Twitter/Facebook status next to contact names, for example, or maybe checking Upcoming/Facebook for clashing events when adding something to iCal.

Visit ➔

Play Magnatune music on your blog

I’m not sure why more labels and shops don’t let you embed streaming players of their music – it’s great promotion.

Visit ➔

Dean Kamen Outdoes Himself (Again)

This is amazing – Dean Kamen (of Segway infamy) has created a prosthetic arm aimed at amputees. It’s not called the ‘Luke arm’ for nothing (fast forward to the arm demos):

Yes, we are living in the future.

Visit ➔

Metallica Repents, Sort Of

This is not how to do it. I love that they make a big fuss about pre-ordering and getting the music “first” where first means “midnight on the day of release”, which is the same time you’ll be able to get it on every other download service (and probably cheaper, too).

They seem to have watched Radiohead and NIN do their thing, and ripped it off without any of the innovation or interest. $125 for a 5 LP + CD + Download + “Platinum Mission:Metallica Experience“ (which seems to amount to some live recordings and ringtones…) doesn’t exactly seem like a great deal.

Visit ➔

Sharing mixtapes is an unstoppable idea. Muxtape is not.

Anthony’s not wrong – the concept of a mixtape or sharing a playlist of tracks with your friends is obviously one that resonates, but centralisation like Muxtape will only lead to the traditional set of legal problems (which will no doubt cripple it).

Decentralisation is the solution.

Visit ➔

Women of the web

Hear hear. Hear hear.

Visit ➔