David Emery OnlineWhy do people buy records?
Well worth a read, especially the points highlighting the self fulfilling prophecy that is the ‘record sales are going down’ meme. However, like many people I’ve seen write about ‘collecting’ music and the rise of vinyl Patrick does miss out on a new trend I’m seeing in younger music fans: they still collect music, but they collect digital music.
They’ve grown up with music being something you play via an iPod, but that doesn’t mean the collecting bug has gone away; they’re just trying to complete their iTunes library, not their record shelf.
Visit ➔Mail.appetizer
It’s finally available for Leopard – hooray! For those that don’t know it provides a little popup notification window when you get mail in Mail.app and is utterly indispensable (along with MailTags).
Visit ➔Muxtape. The Simplest Mixtape Service Yet.
It’s obviously going to get shut down at some point fairly soon, but until then Muxtape is a beautiful piece of work. All it does is let you share a ‘mixtape’, or collection of MP3s you’ve uploaded, but it does it perfectly. A very good example of ‘less is more’.
Visit ➔The Raconteurs - Salute Your Solution
I really quite like the new video for The Raconteurs – it’s not filmed in the traditional sense but actually a composition of hundreds of still photos:
Visit ➔Japan: URL's Are Totally Out
File under ‘interesting cultural shift’. I’ve noticed the same thing a couple of times over here as well.
Visit ➔Rock Band meets iTunes, opens built-in music store
They’ve already sold over 6 million songs on the Rock Band store, which I think is a pretty amazing figure. I would also hazard a guess that these sales are much more biased towards catalogue sales then a traditional retailer would be.
Visit ➔Sleevage: Editors: The End Has a Start
Very interesting article on the cover for the Editors latest album. I’m not particularly a fan of theirs, but the cover and the other bits of photography used are really quite nice.
Visit ➔wikinear.com, OAuth and Fire Eagle
Very nifty Wikipedia – Fire Eagle mashup that shows you Wikipedia articles around where you are at the moment. Definitely want to do some geo-location based stuff soon…
Visit ➔Matador Intended Play sampler 2008 — ready to download and burn
Everyone likes a good bit of free, legitimate indie music, don’t they? 12 tracks from Matador Records’ finest.
Visit ➔Writer Arthur C Clarke dies at 90
Nothing I could write would do him justice. He was one of the best.
Visit ➔Rapper DMX on Barack Obama
Guess what all you middle class white people that read the internet? Most people (even in the US) couldn’t care less about the forthcoming presidential election, let alone about who might be in the running to run.
And really, why would they care? Is it really going to make any difference to them?
Visit ➔Safari 3.1
Awesomeness – Apple have released a new version of Safari for Mac and Windows (and they still releasing for 10.4 as well, which is nice) that supports CSS Animation, Transitions and Web fonts among other things. That means the time I spent when I launched this design adding CSS Animations wasn’t in vain (so if you’ve just upgraded, this is probably a good site to test it out in).
Visit ➔Martian Headsets
4749 words that, if you’re a web developer, are a must read. The definitive last word in all this IE standards stuff that’s been going round recently, although that last word could well be ‘screwed’.
Visit ➔furbo.org · Brain surgeons
Always a bit of a shock to find someone that actually knows what they’re talking about.
Visit ➔“As someone who has been involved in iPhone development for the past six months, please let me offer you a healthy dose of reality.
Twitterrific on the iPhone could definitely make use of a background process to gather new tweets. In fact, a prototype version of the software did just that. And it was a huge design failure: after doing XML queries every 5 minutes, the phone’s battery was almost dead after 4 hours.”
Flickr Video Said To Be Launching Next Month
I’m interested to see what the Flickr team can come up with when it comes to video; I think Vimeo comes closest to getting it ‘right’ but there’s still a lot of room for Flickr-style improvement.
Visit ➔The Dry Side
A perfect example of good design, and improving something that no one would think needs improving.
Visit ➔Gravatar Blog: Big changes afoot
Nice to see Gravatar back up and running properly, and I’m sure the re-write from RoR to PHP had nothing to do with it being nice and fast now. Nothing at all. Not one bit.
I’ve now got Gravatar’s up and running here, using the nice and simple GlxGravatar Textpattern plugin. Took all of 5 mins to implement, so there’s no excuse, folks.
Visit ➔Out of Five | Stuff reviewed through Twitter
Simple service that lets you review things via Twitter. More ambient information etc…
Visit ➔Operation Toblerone: Yahoo Closing London Offices
Yahoo! is one of the main players in the London web dev scene so this is going to shake things up a bit. While obviously it’s going to be a bit of a kick in the teeth for those that work there, I can’t help but feel that this is probably a good thing in the long term – it’s not as though any of them will have problems getting jobs (why aren’t we hiring now, god darn it…).
Better to get out early…
Update: I’m now hearing that the engineering teams are staying put – it’s just the ‘HQ’ functions that are moving – which is obviously good news.
Visit ➔