David Emery Online

Adam Green

We’ve just launched the new site for Adam Green, and rather pixel-tastic it is too. James, who built this one (and still doesn’t have a website), really rose to the challenge of making something inspired by Leisure Suit Larry. With hookers.

Watch Out FriendFeed: Socialthing! Is Even Easier to Use

While Socialthing looks like a bit of a lifestream bandwagon jumper on first glance it looks rather useful as an aggregator for those of us that have friends scattered across lots of services. If they could release a Twitterific-style desktop app that works across different services they would have a killer app on their hands.

First Details, Screenshots of the Fire Eagle Launch

Fire Eagle looks like it could be very interesting slightly further down the road when their are some apps available. As it is all we have is a comprehensive API and a very pretty website to play with. If you want an invite let me know – I’ve still got a couple left…

SSSS Equals No SXSW

Airport security really is crazy, isn’t it? I can’t believe that they almost forced a plane to land just because someone got a headcount wrong…

ExpressionEngine 2.0 “official” screenshots

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not really a fan of the current version of ExpressionEngine – none of it works quite the way I expect it too, and it certainly doesn’t have the logical, well thought out nature that Textpattern has (although it does offer more features). That being said, these screens of EE 2 are very impressive and it looks like they may finally be able to deliver on the promise that EE 1.5 doesn’t quite deliver on.

BBC iPlayer On iPhone: Behind The Scenes

The encoding tech that drives the iPlayer is very impressive, as is the new iPhone compatible version (although it needs a proper native interface). It really feels like we’re in the future when you can wirelessly stream programs onto a small, large screened device flawlessly.

The Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit

Looking pretty good – I haven’t had a chance to install it yet, but IE8 has lots of very promising features (including some microformats support!).

I did find this amusing titbit in the release notes, considering the current push by Microsoft with Silverlight as a Adobe Flash competitor:

Adobe AIR Download Center Web site
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 crashes when you access the following Adobe AIR Download Center Web site:
http://get.adobe.com/air
No workaround is currently available for this issue.

Last.fm's SXSW Band Aid

Last.fm have done a recommendation service for what bands to see at SXSW this year, based on the music in your Last.fm profile. Very nifty – just wish I was going so I could you it…

1,000 True Fans

Very interesting article on the importance of ‘true’ fans – ones that will buy everything you produce and drive 200 miles just to see you play. On a similar topic it’s interesting to note that the $300 ultra-deluxe version of the Nine Inch Nails album – which was limited to 2500 copies – sold out within 24 hours.

Microsoft's Interoperability Principles and IE8

Great stuff – Microsoft have reversed their decision about all this IE8-behaving-like-IE7-by-default rubbish. Good on them!

Indistr Lets You Choose the Price for Buying Music

Indistr is actually a surprisingly nice site, although slightly hard to browse around. There’s definitely a place for direct artist digital sales, although they’re not going to replace record companies (and their strengths in promotion and finance) any time soon.

Apple to Allow Free iPhone/Touch Apps Without Special Approval?

I do hope this proves to be the case – it would be a big shame to have to go through the hoops of Apple approval (which will no doubt take a while) before getting an app out there. If Apple approval is the only to way to get apps on the iPhone, I’m sure jailbreaking will keep its popularity.

The Broken Web Editor

I still don’t get Wordpress’ popularity – it seems to have so many problems. While Textpattern doesn’t feature the rich text editor Wordpress tries to use at least it, you know, works.

What’s wrong with this picture?

I can’t see this concept (digital insertion of advertising into pre-recorded video) really taking off, as it surely takes far too much work to have a team of animators (badly) overlaying adverts on billboards in the background of every single episode of a program?

Also, why would anyone think this form of advertising actually works? Just because a logo of a film appears in a video doesn’t mean that has any impact on ticket sales at the box office.

NZRN - On the internet.

Beautiful site design – love the cartography-inspired background and the use of a grid.

How Rainbows ruined the charts

I’d noticed that In Rainbows had been dominating the top of the Last.fm charts a while back – it’s amazing to see it’s still doing so. Maybe for last.fm the biggest improvement in scrobbles per week would be a more interesting metric…

Google Talk chatback

Pretty nifty – you can now embed a Google Talk widget into your webpage/blog/wherever and let your readers chat with you without them having to do any setup, logging in etc.

Let’s see if this works:

Jimmy Kimmel's Fucking Ben Affleck

Ok, so this is officially the most childish and immature thing I have ever posted to this blog. It is also possibly the funniest. Please be aware that I, like you, have an extremely low tolerance to ‘funny’ internet videos – rest assured that these are not some of them.

First, watch this:

Then, watch this (which manages to maybe even be better):

Bloglines Suffers Major Outage

This is exceedingly annoying; I would switch away from Bloglines in a heartbeat if I could find a alternative that worked in the same way. The two features I need are marking all of the items in a feed read when you view a feed (as opposed to having to scroll through them) and a view all function that groups by feed (not mixed together like Google Reader).

EDIT: Of course, the minute I post about it it starts working again…

Game Criticism, Why We Need It, and Why Reviews Aren't It

More good thoughts around the whole video-games-as-art thing.