David Emery Online

Jack White at the Forum

David Emery — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:49:05 +0100

Retina iPad vs The Web

David Emery — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 18:36:12 +0000

Many words have already been spilled about the sheer beauty of the screen on the new iPad; whilst they seem hyperbolic, they are pretty spot on: it’s amazing. The best screen I’ve ever seen, easily.

In fact, it’s too good.

When the iPhone 4 came out I – and many others – started shunning any apps that hadn’t been “retina-ized”, as they looked pretty rubbish in comparison with everything else on the device. The web got away ok on this front, as the screen was pretty small and most sites were being scaled down anyway (in fact, the retina display really helped with the readability of scaled down sites).

Now, however, in comes the retina iPad and it doesn’t have that luxury of scaling down sites; it has a big enough display to show sites at full resolution, and in fact the web is one of the primary uses of the device.

And now, all of a sudden, it looks rubbish.

Text is fine, as is anything using CSS3 properties like border-radius, but any and all graphics look pretty horrible and stand out like a sore thumb in their near 8bit pixel-y glory.

Fortunately it’s pretty easy to send retina-display devices (currently only iPads, iPods and iPhones, as there are no Android pixel-double devices I’m aware of) different graphics using a CSS media query thusly:

@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2) { // styles go here }

Combined with the background-size (to scale the images by half) and some double size graphics it’s not to hard, if a little bit of a pain if you’ve got a graphics heavy site. There’s also the obvious downside that you’ve got to send double size graphics, which will mean they take up a lot more bandwidth but that can’t really be helped.

For inline images – rather then CSS based graphics – it’s slightly trickier; you could just serve everyone double size graphics and scale them down to the right size, but that would have pretty significant bandwidth implications (although has the plus side of being easy to implement). Alternatively, you could use a bit of JS to switch graphics resources on the fly in a similar way to this Responsive Images script does.

In a similar fashion I’m hoping that the retina iPad is finally the kick up the backside that eMagazine creators need to switch away from packaging up a series of images as a “magazine”; they’re already huge and doubling them in size to make them retina compatible will drive most over the 1GB/issue mark, which would be ridiculous. Here’s hoping they switch to something HTML based so the file sizes get significantly smaller, not even bigger…

Alabama Shakes at the Boston Arms

David Emery — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:53:21 +0000

More photos on Flickr.

[Link] Music apps – beyond the hype

David Emery — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:47:54 +0000

From: http://www.theappside.com/events-2/

‘Music apps – beyond the hype’ takes an in-depth look at the business realities of producing, marketing and monetising music related apps. The event features an overview of the music apps market, practical advice on how best to market your apps, instructive lessons from a variety of artist apps case studies, and a variety of speakers from across the music apps value chain.

I’ll be talking about the Adele mobile app at this tonight – hopefully should be a pretty interesting event.

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Grimes at White Heat

David Emery — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 22:52:17 +0000

More photos here on Flickr, and if you haven’t heard of Grimes listen to/download ‘Genesis’ below, as she’s awesome:

[Link] Jack White - Love Interruption

David Emery — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:45:02 +0000

From: http://www.jackwhiteiii.com/

"Love Interruption" is the first taste of Jack White's debut album, Blunderbuss, out April 23 on Third Man Records/XL Recordings.

Firstly: new Jack White solo record! I am a massive White Stripes fan, so this is a Very Good Thing. Also, we made a widget for it that spins at 45rpm:

I’m not sure if I’ve really mentioned the widgets we’ve developed and have been using since last August – they’re quite nifty, if I do say so myself. They’re HTML5-based and work on iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices; they get detected by the lovely HypeMachine so they show up when bloggers post about them; they’re completely fluid (using both media queries and a dab of JS) so they should work at any size; and lastly you can use them as little iOS web apps (if you have a data connection) – try saving this page to your home screen for example.

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[Link] Google Fuses Google+ Into Search

David Emery — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:48:27 +0000

From: http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/10/google-fuses-google-into-search-and-there-are-bigger-changes-afoot/

The short version is that Google search results are going to be automatically personalized (to a greater degree than they were already) for each user, with signals drawn from your Google+ Circles being used to highlight things your friends — or you, yourself — have shared. Any of these personalized matches will appear alongside ‘normal’ search results. And Google will also pull in photos shared on Picasa or Google+ (they’ll even show up if you’ve marked them private, but they’ll still only be visible to you).

It seems like there’s an ever growing opportunity for someone to come in and do search much better then Google does it, stripping it back to basics and focusing on the quality of results (which are appalling for so many search types – anything product focused just leads to page upon page of retailer sites, for example).

I think the attempt to (badly) add social features to all of their platforms could be the undoing of Google.

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[Link] Willis Earl Beal - Evening's Kiss

David Emery — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:45:42 +0000

From: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=U3xpSYTdxlA&gl=GB

Taken from the album Acousmatic Sorcery out in 2012 on Hot Charity/XL Recordings.

I love this really quite a lot. Reminds me in a strange way of early White Stripes; obviously not in terms of the music, but in terms of atmosphere.

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2011

David Emery — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:19:42 +0000

So, I think we can all agree that 2011 was quite the year, right?

A lot, err, happened.

From a personal perspective it was pretty good. Being part of the whole Adele thing was undeniably fun (if not a little bit surreal at several points), as was working another Radiohead record (although the record itself was really only a component in a larger whole). It’s fair to say work dominated 2011 for me, which is both good and bad. More non-work things in 2012 would be sensible, although I think I think that every year.

It seemed as though 2011 in general was less good for albums, and much better for single tracks. There was no great album of 2012, in my opinion. A good year for music, then, but not a great year for the long player format. I don’t think that’s any result of a grand “the world is changing” shift away from albums, more just that by pure coincidence and bad luck no one happened to make a collection of tracks that was “right” this year.

So, to that end rather then do a best albums of 2011 list that probably shouldn’t have a #1, I’ve compiled a list of my favourite 40 tracks of the year. 40, because it turned out that’s about how many I liked. It ranges about a bit genre-wise, which I think illustrates potentially illustrates a wider trend of the Internet enabling people to easily try stuff out that’s not traditionally in their comfort zone.

Spotify is the reason Rihanna is on this list, basically.

Best tracks of 2011

40. Baby Missiles – The War On Drugs
39. Georgie Ray – British Sea Power
38. 212 – Azealia Banks
37. A Chore – Tom Vek
36. Terra Incognita – Atlas Sound
35. Surgeon – St. Vincent
34. Countdown – Beyonce
33. The Words That Maketh Murder – PJ Harvey
32. Calgary – Bon Iver
31. Under Cover of Darkness – The Strokes
30. New Brigade – Iceage
29. Villains of the Moon – Cold Cave
28. Otis – Watch The Throne
27. Queen of Hearts – Fucked Up
26. Jesus Fever – Kurt Vile
25. Don’t Sit Down ‘Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair – Arctic Monkeys
24. California – EMA
23. Beat of My Drum – Nicola Roberts
22. Hold On – SBTRKT
21. Someone Like You – Adele
20. Everything Goes My Way – Metronomy
19. White Limo – Foo Fighters
18. Headlines – Drake
17. Scarlet – 2:54
16. Endless Blue – The Horrors
15. She – Tyler, The Creator
14. Diamond Way – Jeff The Brotherhood
13. Codex – Radiohead
12. NY is Killing Me – Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx
11. Dirt – WU LYF
10. We Found Love – Rihanna
9. The Wilhelm Scream – James Blake
8. Rolling In The Deep (Jamie xx shuffle) – Adele
7. Goshen – Beirut
6. The Look – Metronomy
5. Powa – Tune-Yards
4. Video Games – Lana Del Ray
3. BTSTU – Jai Paul
2. Mozaik – Zomby
1. The Daily Mail – Radiohead

You can listen to these tracks as a playlist on Spotify (if they’re on there).

[Link] How does a Pitchfork review affect an album's popularity?

David Emery — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 22:36:44 +0000

From: http://ethicsgirls.com/pitchforkeffect/

Pitchfork is a popular-as-hell indie music blog. It's got a hipster-snobby reputation and the reviews are best summarised as "When Adjectives Attack," but their recommendations tend to be on the money and I've found a lot of good music thanks to their Best New Music category.
Pitchfork's also got a reputation of being a real tastemaker, anointing new albums & artists to the big leagues. But is this backed up by the data? I decided to find out.

In short: they don’t (although you need more data for a less flippant conclusion). Also: yay for graphs!

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