Flicker Fusion

No More iTunes by Florian Pichler

No More iTunes by Florian Pichler

safariextensions:

safariextensions:

NoMoreiTunes is an extension for Safari 5 which disables the script that tries to start iTunes when you visit a link to the iTunes Store. It’s annoying and redundant as there is iTunes Preview for Music and Apps now.

Since this doesn’t work on movies I modified the redirecting page for them to show a big button which loads iTunes once (and only if) you click it. I’m working on this one to become a bit more powerful.

I didn’t realise how much I wanted this extension until I heard about it.

this critique of safari 5s new reader feature has

This critique of Safari 5’s new Reader feature has been making the rounds today and it’s a good read, if only to test your acuity for spotting parody. Reader is a feature that adds a Readability-style view of a web page that lets you focus on the text you want to read and not the piles and piles of cruft that litters a great deal of the web these days.

Your first hint that you’re in for a treat is that it’s written by a self-professed “tech analyst and community manager” – now, there’s a title no one would self-apply where I come from. The page itself is loaded with ads – a banner ad at the top, immediately followed by an AdWord block, columns of ads along the side, those awful Vibrant in-text advertising links, more AdWord blocks completely unrelated to the content. The article is broken into three “pages” to artificially gin-up page views and the rest of the page is littered with social media sharing buttons (Jim Lynch has 17 facebook “fans” you’ll be excited to learn).

The argument Lynch is trying to make amongst all of that monetization is that ads pay for web sites like his and Safari Reader hides those ads and is therefore morally wrong. This is something of a mission of Lynch’s, he dedicates a full top level piece of his site navigation to another post about ad-blockers. I honestly don’t know what’s worse, that Lynch somehow doesn’t understand the problem or that he does and simply chooses to ignore it.

There’s a bigger truth here, though, hidden amongst all of that spammy content and gnashing of teeth. There’s really no reason why people like Lynch should have ever been making any money with their site. The ability install some free software on a cheap webhost and add a few lines of javascript aren’t a license to print money. I don’t mean to pick on Lynch here, he’s merely representative of the kind of entitlement that argues that merely having a blog means you should also have an income.

Not to get all Merlin about it, but this shit takes work and good work will be rewarded by an audience that respects what you do and feels that you respect them and the attention they pay you. AdWord blocks aren’t work, dirty tricks to boost your CPM aren’t work, making things that people want to see and read and pass on and get excited about is work. People who do work at this are probably the ones most excited about Safari Reader because it means that more people are going to spend more time reading the words that they put actual effort into writing. The sad fact is, those are probably the sites that need Safari Reader the least while the ones that need it most aren’t worth reading to begin with.

as someone who also prefers albums to singles

As someone who also prefers albums to singles, this is rad.

Marco, I wonder if it makes more sense to focus dev work on adding Amazon mp3 support instead of fixing the site for Firefox?

marco:

Preview.fm: An experiment for fast browsing of full albums.

I buy full albums, not singles. I listen to the complete albums, and I don’t use shuffle. My iTunes is sorted by “Album by Year”. I like albums.

But as this increasingly becomes a minority opinion, music storefronts like iTunes and Amazon MP3 are encouraged to build their interfaces and priorities around hit singles. As a result, whenever I discover a new band and browse their albums to decide which to buy, the storefront interfaces often work against me, making it difficult to quickly find a band’s albums and navigate between a bunch of them for preview and comparison.

So I made this.

Pros:

  • It’s very fast — much faster than searching and navigating between albums in iTunes.
  • Albums get clean, short URLs, useful for blogging or pasting into chat, IMs, or Twitter.
  • You can open up a bunch of albums in tabs for consideration when you’re checking out a new band.
  • You can hit the Play button and it plays all preview tracks in full quality. (Amazon MP3 can work in tabs, but its previews are low-quality. iTunes did finally add a Preview All button, but its navigation is slow.)

Cons:

  • Only works in Chrome and Safari so far. Mozilla chose not to support MP3 and M4A files in HTML5 <audio> players in Firefox, making their <audio> implementation useless to pragmatic web developers in practice (just like their <video> implementation). At some point, I might add Firefox support using a Flash audio player, which will be a lot of work and will benefit nobody except Firefox users. (Sounds a lot like what web designers need to do for Internet Explorer support.) Yes, Firefox users, you’ll need to use Flash, because your browser maker is taking a political stand against proprietary formats. (?)
  • Occasionally crashes Safari. I don’t know exactly why yet, but my best guess is that either I’m creating a strange Javascript condition somewhere, or it doesn’t like me creating so many HTML5 <audio> players at once.
  • Might only work for the U.S. iTunes Store.

Disclosure: The iTunes links are affiliate links, and I will receive 5% of the sale price if you buy an album from Preview.fm. So buy a $9.99 album and I’ll get 50 glorious cents. Buy 20 of them and I can buy my own album! It’s like those terrible “Get 10 CDs free!” music clubs from middle school, but in reverse. (Some of my 10 free CDs in middle school: Trio, White Town, Erasure. Remember any of yours?)

im probably a little more excited about this than

I’m probably a little more excited about this than is allowed in most states.

seoulbrother:

I’m no artist but I made this on my iPad with a little vector illustration app called Freeform. It was pretty easy and intuitive to use. Grabbing the finer lines was a little tough but I survived. Check it out.

What’s it for? A little project I’m working on with some really great people. What kind of great people? Kim Lisagor, JT Dobbs, James Thornburgh, John Moltz1 and others.

So look for it, next Monday, June 7th. Don’t worry, it has nothing to do with WWDC or Flash and it’s much more accessible.

Yeah, that guy. ↩

look at this face what do you see its the

Look at this face. What do you see?

It’s the last time you’re going to see it. Well, at least like this. In a few hours, I’m having my corneas shaved a few microns WITH A LASER so that I won’t need glasses any more. I’ve been glasses guy for a decade now, time to try something new.

See that bump above my right eye? Maybe you’ve never noticed it before but it’s been there for a while. It’s a cyst and in a few weeks a plastic surgeon is going to remove it. I’m hoping the scar is at least more badass than the bump.

The economics of data

So, AT&T changed its mobile data usage rates – from now on, you’ll need to pick between a 200 megabyte per month plan for $15 or 2 gigabytes a month for $25. This replaces the previous plan, which was unlimited data for $30 a month.

Most folks recognize that this is actually ok 1. If you log into your AT&T account, you’ll probably find that you’re somewhere between the 200 megabytes and 2 gigabyte limits so you’ll be paying $5 a month less than you were. Those numbers seem a bit arbitrary to me but I’m guessing AT&T has well paid accountants tasked with figuring out just the right sweet spot to wring the most bucks while pissing off the fewest number of people. I seriously doubt many people will downgrade to the 200 megabyte plan but even fewer even come close to hitting the 2 gigabyte ceiling. Right now, 2 gigabytes is effectively unlimited, though this could change soon enough, once we start streaming our music or television everywhere all the time.

Frankly, this strikes me as reasonable. I’m no AT&T fanboy (oh god, does such a thing exist?) and I’ve certainly oft criticized their poor network performance but, as I understand it, at least part of the problem has to do with a small percentage of users who use a disproportionate amount of bandwidth. I don’t know much about the intricacies of scaling out cell phone networks, but this strikes me as plausible and moving to a metered approach seems like a reasonable step in helping to solve the problem. You can only add so many towers, especially in crowded, data hungry cities like New York and San Francisco.

Of course, not everyone is reasonable and, well, haters gonna hate. Within an hour of the news, pundits like the insufferable Jeff Jarvis had spewed off a stream of tweets and a blog post about how “evil” and “cynical” this new move is, complete with plenty of # fail hashtags. It’s like Jarvis doesn’t understand basic economics – funny thing, when you charge people more for a limited commodity, they use less of it. Crazy, I know.

Seriously, look at that. Does Jarvis actually do anything but sit around and bitch and moan all day?

Listen, I’d love it if I could get unlimited ultrafast bandwidth everywhere all the time WITH A PONY but that part of the future hasn’t distributed itself just yet. Maybe it’s coming some day, maybe it’ll never be here and we’ve all been kidding ourselves. Here, today, in 2010, bandwidth costs money and you should probably pay for it when you use it. Most people are going to end up paying a little bit less, “power users” like Jarvis will probably pay a little bit more. Or maybe they’ll spare us all from their ranting and actually think a little before they tweet – just imagine the bandwidth savings.

UPDATE: Isaac Hepworth has smarter things to say about “unlimited” bandwidth. He uses words like “function of data transport” and “decoupling” and generally has a much better understanding of this than I do.

The tethering fee is bullshit, though ↩︎