David Emery Online

I remember seeing a talk once from a guy who did sound for the ER (on TV, not in actual hospitals). He was telling stories with the sound - foreshadowing moments, enhancing themes, adding drama - all via secondary attention. And I've always wanted to try and use sound as a way of telling you what's going on in/on/with the web. We've been mucking about with a few varients of this - from the abstract and arty to the slightly less abstract and arty - and we're going to try them out via some boxes which Adrian's building for us.

But some of this didn’t add up. ‘Gay hackers target Amy Winehouse’ still seemed too good a headline to be true.

Then I saw that Lil B was releasing his new album today. Apparantly his album ‘I’m Gay’ (named so in support of the LGBT community, though Lil B is himself a heterosexual) had been released without any notice.

Convenient? I later hear through the grapevine that Winehouse and Pritchard share the same PR guy. Would it be too cynical to imagine he has a new client in Lil B? Yes, it would. Until you see that Lil B had a ‘secret’ meeting with Universal staff back in March.

Does this smell even a tiny bit like a marketing campaign? Is it possible that the site owners and label did this purely for press coverage?

Who knows, maybe I’m just a Silicon Valley guy who has lost touch with reality. It’s entirely possible. But maybe, just maybe, the opposite is true. Maybe “regular” people have been allergic to using groups in the past because they simply don’t want to use groups. Maybe it’s one of those things that’s a good idea on paper or in a brain-storming session, but doesn’t translate onto the web.

Maybe — gasp — the web isn’t meant to mimic the real world.

Realising that getting clearance for all the samples would be a headache, they found a loophole and applied for radio licences, becoming an internet radio company instead. The upside was no tussles with lawyers. The downside was they couldn't charge a bean: the app will be completely free.

It was fairly common in medieval times to put east at the top. Which has a logic to it: when traveling across open terrain, the one consistent thing you had to orient yourself by when you broke camp in the morning was the sunrise. In fact, that’s the source of the term “orient yourself”: it literally means to face east.

I have been interested in the idea of building a turntable-based UI in HTML for years; however, the past presented a number of technical hurdles. Setting dreams of browser-based remixing aside, simply recreating the core design elements of a turntable was practically infeasible until the advent of CSS3. The features most notably missing from browsers involved drawing circles, rotation of elements and low-level control of audio. As of 2011, it's a pleasure to say that these features can be implemented almost entirely using HTML, CSS and JavaScript alone.

Apple has quietly changed its guidelines on the pricing of In-App Subscriptions on the App Store. There are no longer any requirements that a subscription be the "same price or less than it is offered outside the app". There are no longer any guidelines about price at all. Apple also removed the requirement that external subscriptions must be also offered as an in-app purchase.

It looks like there’s finally some major improvements in mobile Safari, some of which I’ve found below on my “first glance” after downloading the SDK. Chime in if you find anything yourself!

“So what’s the book about and stuff I guess,” you ask. Well, Responsive Web Design expands on the ideas I articulated in the original article. It’s a crash course in how you can apply fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries to your own work, but let’s face it: design is so much more than those three ingredients. As a result, I’ve tried to share a few stories I’ve picked up from working on real, live responsive projects: the lessons I’ve learned, the questions that have been raised, the hard choices made.

Notifications that come down from the top bar could be how Apple ends up doing things in iOS 5. After all, this would mimic already existing functionality — when tethering, a blue strip appears along the top; when on the phone, it’s a green strip. Might notifications (or at least Twitter notifications) produce a gray strip?

And so to The Future Is Medieval. Without any buildup, fanfare or whatever you want to call the pop equivalent of leaving Red Bull cans scattered around Leeds city centre, the successor to 2008's Off With Their Heads appeared on Kaiser Chiefs' website on Friday. In doing so, it effectively heralds the arrival of the world's first bespoke album. Ten songs from a choice of 20 for £7.50 – no more, no less – but what those songs are, and the order in which they run, is down to you.

Thanks to Pusher hosting websocket service, i was able to create this quick experiment using smartphones' accelerometer, websockets (with fallback to flash) and CSS 3D magic.

There'll be two kinds of applications for Windows 8, one that runs in a traditional desktop, and the other pseudo-mobile apps based on HTML5 and Javascript, but both environments -- rather, the entire OS -- have been designed from the ground up for touchscreen use. Keyboard and mouse will still be options for both sets of programs.

Facebook has partnered with Spotify on a music-streaming service that could be launched in as little as two weeks, sources close to the deal have told Forbes.

The integrated service is currently going through testing, but when launched, Facebook users will see a Spotify icon appear on the left side of their newsfeed, along with the usual icons for photos and events.

Bronze is a new non-interactive music format in which recorded material is transformed in real time, generating a unique and constantly evolving interpretation of a song on each listen.

The first piece of music available in Bronze will be Flesh Freeze by Gwilym Gold.

And then there's LA Noire, the James Ellroy-inspired crime drama, which has caused a stir, and rightly so, with its firm focus on narrative and staggering new facial animation technology. I'm a massive dweeb who keeps up with the latest gaming developments, and even I was astounded at what they've pulled off here. You're watching actors give genuine performances – within something that is still defiantly and unapologetically a video game.

We've seen deep discounting before from Amazon. But today the online retailer is hit new lows by offering a download of the new Lady Gaga album "Born This Way" along with a digital version of the CD booklet today only for just 99 cents

What i3D does instead is show you several scenes that change perspective as you tilt your iPad side to side and up and down. The effect does not depend on the gyros built into the iPad, but instead uses the camera to track the position of your head and render a changing perspective in real time.

I tried Amazon and it just made me depressed. Though I haven’t received my invite yet, the others who have tried Google Music have all said how pitiful it is. Rdio and Pandora are both fantastic at what they do, but the songs you listen to don’t belong to you.