iPhone synthesizer
Amazing! Jordan Rudess demonstrates and performs with Bebot, a new multi-touch performance synthesizer for iPhone.
via YouTube – Rudess Meets Bebot.
Tags: iphone, music, synthesizer, synthesis, instruments, demo, demos, synthesizers, Jordan Rudess
Filed under: creativity, iphone, music
Happy birthday, Pete Zeldman!
- Pete Zeldman, impromptu polyrhythmic drum solo
- Captured by the Drum Institute, London (video)
- Pete Zeldman, Drum Wizard
- Interview at drums.com.
- Pete Zeldman on Facebook
- Like it says.
Tags: petezeldman, drums, drumming, polyrthmic
Filed under: music
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Kind of Blue – 50th Anniversary
Kind of Blue: Fifty years ago, Miles Davis released an album of pure modal improvisation. It changed not only jazz but all music that came after. Wikipedia’s write-up explains, although their fact-filled prose misses all the poetry. Better still, just listen. Thanks for the nudge: Ray.
Filed under: Genius, Jazz, music
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To be of use to others is the only true happiness. Although a 160 GB iPhone would also be nice.
I was hoping Apple would announce a new generation of iPhones with hard drives sufficient to hold an entire music collection plus a handful of videos. Failing that, I was hoping Apple would announce a new generation of iPods that were exactly like iPhones (sans the phone), with hard drives sufficient to hold an entire music collection plus a handful of videos. What Apple announced was an iPhone without the phone.
So I bought a 160 GB iPod Classic. I already have an iPhone, and you can borrow it when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
The Classic holds my digital music collection (currently, 31 GB) plus five or six movies digitized at high enough quality to play on a Cinema Screen, and has acres of drive space to spare. I feel that I will never fill it up, although I’ve thought that about every hard drive I’ve ever owned, and I soon filled them all.
The Classic is new and shiny and I almost never use it because the classic iPod interface feels prehistoric after using an iPhone. (Indeed, half the things I do on a computer feel awkward compared to doing them on an iPhone. Click on a friend’s street address in your iPhone. Wow! Now do the same thing on your computer. Ick.)
There are about five movies my toddler loves on the Classic, but she won’t watch them on the Classic. She wants the iPhone and asks for it by name, like cats do for Meow Mix.
The Classic is good for plugging your whole music collection into your stereo. Or it will be when the dock arrives. The Classic does not ship with a dock, and no dock is made for it, but you can order a $50 Universal Dock from Apple. The order takes four weeks to process plus another week to ship. Be kind and call those five weeks a month. A month after unpacking my new Classic I will be able to hook it into my stereo and charge it at the same time—something I expected to be able to do on the day it arrived.
The frustration of that wish is not tragic, but it is not particularly smart marketing, either. This, after all, is a product for people who ardently wish to carry their entire music collection plus a handful of movies in their pocket. Wish fulfillment is the product’s whole reason for being. (Well, wish fulfillment plus the execrable state of air travel, which can turn a jaunt between Chicago and New York into an odyssey of despair and boredom. Carry a Classic and those five hour delays fly by, even when nothing else is flying.)
The guaranteed nightmare of even the shortest business trip aside, what do you do with the Classic? Well, I sometimes bring it to the gym. Because sometimes at the gym, it takes a while to find the right groove. The iPhone’s 7.3 GBs aren’t enough to hold a sufficient musical selection to ensure a great workout.
On the other hand, I can’t answer a business call on my iPod. So even though the Classic gives me lots more music to choose from, I mostly bring my iPhone to the gym.
No iPod is an island, or should be.
Did I mention that the iPhone has a gorgeous, high-resolution screen and the iPod does not? Then there’s the whole gesturing with your fingertips business. How nice that feels, and how weird and slow and un-Apple-like it now feels to go back to the clickwheel that once felt so poshly smart and modern.
I tell you this. If Apple can put a capacious, chunked-out hard drive on the iPhone—even if doing so makes the phone a tad clunkier—the company will have on its hands its hottest convergent technology box yet. And I’ll be the first in line.
Only 95 shopping days ’til Christmas, Steve.
Tags: apple, ipod, iphone, comparison, shopping
Filed under: Design, business, fashion, industry, iphone, music, style
That Busted GIF Feeling
Has this happened to you? You’re using the iLike social music discovery network and things are humming along nicely. Then one day, because of a brief iLike.com server hiccup, the iLike Sidebar for iTunes is unable to download and refresh your friends’ photos. Instead of your music pals’ smiling faces, you see the classic “busted GIF” icon that web browsers use to denote “image file not found.”
Here is a screenshot of the iLike Sidebar with missing images.
Here is a screenshot, a few days later, with all friend images missing.
It’s what my iLike sidebar has looked like for the past two weeks. It may be what it will look like forever. Has anyone else encountered this problem? Anybody found a solution? Nothing I’ve tried works.
- Refreshing the sidebar by clicking the semi-circular “refresh” icon to the right of the label, “Recently played by your friends,” does not solve the problem.
- Hiding and re-showing the sidebar does not solve the problem.
- Waiting days, or even weeks, for the problem to correct itself does not solve the problem. The problem never corrects itself.
- Downloading a fresh copy of the iLike Sidebar and reinstalling does not solve the problem.
iLike’s FAQ does not address the problem. When you encounter a problem iLike’s FAQ does not address, you are supposed to contact iLike. I contacted iLike last week. I’ve also written to Dick Cheney. I haven’t heard back from either one. I’m more likely to hear from Cheney. Cheney doesn’t have a Facebook application and he isn’t adding 300,000 users a day.
Like every other recent website, iLike identifies itself as a beta. When you identify yourself as a beta, and you’re adding 300,000 users a day, it’s to be expected that your technology may be imperfect, and it’s also understandable that you may not have time to respond to every user who contacts you about a problem. Hell, I’m not a beta (and I’m not adding 300,000 users a day) and I can’t respond to everyone who contacts me. I get it.
In the scheme of things, a broken feature in a free web app is no big deal. I still like iLike. But if anyone knows how to squash this bug, I’d like it even better.
Filed under: Applications, Community, Tools, music
An Event Apart iMix
By popular demand, here’s most of the music that played between sessions at An Event Apart Seattle 2007 (requires iTunes). The complete playlist can be viewed on iLike.
Tags: aneventapart, imix, itunes, music, mixes
Filed under: An Event Apart, music
iTunes, iLike, and iWish
At long last, the new iTunes upgrade lets you replace DRM versions of music you bought at the iTunes store with new, higher-quality, non-DRM-protected versions. Everyone must be as happy as I was; the whole world apparently bought non-DRM-protected versions of its music today. How else to explain the inability of Apple’s server to deliver the purchased music?
I’ve got 45 files stuck in a download queue that blazes along at about 16 bytes per second, yes, I said bytes, before timing out and locking up. (Screen shots: 1, 2.) The first 50 files or so downloaded at normal speed; then everything ground to a halt, and it’s been that way for hours.
I don’t mind waiting for Apple to sort its network problems. I just wish iTunes would quit nudging me to sign in and download files that are just plumb stuck.
I like iLike
Speaking of music and bandwidth problems, in less than two weeks of use I have become addicted to iLike™. This clever web app uses iTunes APIs to keep track of the music you are playing and “watch” the music your friends are playing via a sidebar that installs itself in iTunes.
Think of it as part Truman Show, part personal radio station. Nobody will know you’re dissecting a moose, but everyone knows you’re listening to Barry Manilow. Insidiously and almost overnight, the app changes the way you listen to music. It might even change the music you listen to. (You might stop listening to Barry.)
With iLike, you can preview your friends’ music, recommend tracks to others, find free music by little-known bands that matches the music you’re listening to, and lots more. It’s a great little application. But the developers need more servers. The app often crawls. At times it’s too underpowered and overtaxed to find your friends’ music, or to record the music you just listened to. Sometimes it even goes offline, and then what do you have? Just you, listening to music. Which suddenly seems not to be enough.
Tags: itunes, ilike, web apps, bandwidth
Monday breakfast links
- Berners-Lee: reinventing HTML
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Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web and founder of the W3C, announces reforms:
It is really important to have real developers on the ground involved with the development of HTML. It is also really important to have browser makers intimately involved and committed. And also all the other stakeholders….
Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn’t work.
- 9 to 5 = average
- To be great in design takes passion and work.
- Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful to Feelings
- I love this.
- Web Directions North
- Our Australian friends set up camp in Vancouver, for what looks like a great two-day conference on standards-based design and development (Vancouver Canada, February 6-8 2007). Speakers include Kelly Goto (Gotomobile), Andy Clarke (malarkey), Adrian Holovaty (Chicago Crime, Washington Post), Douglas Bowman (Google Visual Design Lead), Dan Cederholm (SimpleBits), Joe Clark (joeclark.org), Dave Shea (CSS Zen Garden), Cameron Moll (Authentic Boredom), Molly Holzschlag (Molly.com), Veerle Pieters (Veerle’s Blog, Duoh!), Kaitlin Sherwood (Google Maps US Census mashup), Tantek Çelik (Technorati).
- Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance
- By Andrew Kirkpatrick, Richard Rutter, Christian Heilmann, Jim Thatcher, Cynthia Waddell, et al. Don’t let the unsexy title fool you. Vast and practically all-encompassing, this newly updated classic belongs on every web designer’s shelf. (Better still, open it and read.)
- I Cannot Possibly Buy Girl Scout Cookies From Your Daughter at This Time
- By Charlie Nadler in McSweeney’s.
- Gemini Girl
- New women’s blog elegantly designed by Ray McKenzie.
- eMusic: 33 Folkways LPs
- Thirty-three important Folkways Recordings for download. Louis Bonfa, Mighty Sparrow, Woodie Guthrie, Henry Cowell and more.
- On having layout – the concept of hasLayout in IE/Win
- Technical but reasonably easy to follow discussion of why Internet Explorer’s rendering of your design may
suckdiffer from your expectations - “Apple’s Backup App is Shit”
- God bless SuperDuper.
Tags: W3C, webdirections, accessibility, haslayout, browsers, mcsweeney’s, folkways
Filed under: Accessibility, Browsers, Design, Ideas, Standards, development, events, links, music, writing
Heartwarming
Baseball weather has come to NYC. And a baseball stadium is where we’ll hold An Event Apart Atlanta in just a few days’ time. If global warming worked the other way — if the winters were getting colder each year — the world’s governments would have already worked together to reverse global warming. But when winter grows milder and spring arrives sooner, it feels so good it’s hard to realize how bad it is. But I digress.
We’re busy prepping for Atlanta, so here are some links:
- Minolta quits camera biz
- A former ad client, at one time the 3rd largest camera maker in the world, can’t compete against digital.
- “Would you write your life story in pencil?” was an ad I tried to sell them for their Maxxum line of high quality, 35mm point-and-shoot SLRs. (Instead they bought “More Maxxum Magic!”, a line I did not write for them.) Even so, it’s sad to see them go.
- Monochrom Brandmarker
- An attempt to evaluate the power of brands by making Austrian people draw twelve logos from memory, 25 people per brand. Via Coudal.com.
- Magnolia Blossom
- Mac OS X dashboard widget embeds social networking in your desktop: “Watch websites scroll across as they are bookmarked by ma.gnolia.com members. Spend less time scrolling through pages of text and find those eye-catching sites now!”
- Gapers Block
- Clean, good-looking, well written Chicago blog.
- In Progress: Logo Design (A)
- Cameron Moll on the National Gazette identity he and Jason Santa Maria are designing.
- In Progress: Logo Design (B)
- Jason Santa Maria on the National Gazette identity he and Cameron Moll are designing.
- Top 15 Skylines in the World v. 3.0
- An urban planner picks his Top 15 skylines. Via Gapers Block.
- Dieter Steffmann typefaces
- Immense archive of Dieter Steffmann fonts. “Acorn Initials” is typical Steffmann work. Re-blogged from March 2004.
- CNN.com redesigns
- 1024 wide. Looks great. Pity about non-validating table layout. Via Hivelogic.com.
- coComment
- In one central place, track comments you’ve left on blogs all over the place.
- My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
- “…total access to original tracks with remix and sampling… Download all the multitracks on two of the songs. Through … Creative Commons licenses, you are free to edit, remix, sample and mutilate these tracks however you like. Add them to your own song or create a new one. Visitors are welcome to post their mixes or songs that incorporate these audio files on the site for others to hear and rate.”
- Drupal
- Open source content management platform that cares about accessibility and standards.
- Airbag – Styrofoam
- Adventures in food management.
- Designers must write
- “As my ability to shape both written and oral communication improves, I am better equipped to direct the work of others.” (Via Cameron Moll.)
- In Search of a Comprehensive Type Design Theory
- “Type designers might be convinced that our profession is vital to society, but we wouldn’t risk going on strike.”
- Ironic Sans – Pre-pixelated clothes
- “Stop worrying about whether or not the producer of that Reality TV show you’re on will pixelate your carefully chosen t-shirt. Beat them to the punch with pre-pixelated products!” (Via K10k.net.)
- Thank You for Smoking – main titles
- Beautiful! via Stan.
- America’s Technology Future at Risk
- A new study released by the Economic Strategy Institute explains why U.S. companies can’t compete in key new business sectors, and offers a variety of regulatory and investment prescriptions (via Thomas L. Friedman).
- Teaching at Risk: Progress and Potholes
- The Final Report of the Teaching Commission (via Thomas L. Friedman).
- It’s a great time to start a business
- Six reasons to start a business today (by 37signals’s David Heinemeier Hansson).
- IE7 Improvements and Bug Tracking
- Eric Meyer weighs in.
- W3C: Failed Commitments?
- Much ado about nothing. Forest. Trees.
- Happy Doomsday to You!
- “Washington was about one horseman short of an apocalypse yesterday.”
Filed under: An Event Apart, Design, Standards, Tools, film, links, music
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Four things
I blame Mark Simonson.
- Four jobs I’ve had
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- Writer for The Washington Post and City Paper
- Laborer in a PVC coating factory
- Art director
- Keyboardist (Yatz, Spoons, Pop Maru, Insect Surfers)
- Four movies I can watch over and over
- Four places I’ve lived
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- New York City
- Washington DC
- Bloomington IN
- Pittsburgh PA
- Four TV shows I love
- Four places I’ve vacationed
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- Istanbul
- Rome
- San Francisco
- London
- Four of my favorite dishes
- Four sites I visit daily
- Four places I would rather be right now
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- Anywhere with Carrie, baby, and doggie.
- Seriously.
- That is my answer.
- Home best.
- Four bloggers I am tagging
Filed under: Design, Memes, film, links, music, people, tv, work
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