Posted in Apple, Design on 21st December 2008, 10:20 pm by Stuart
I’ve been noodling around with a few vector based designs this weekend (makes a nice change from coding). When if comes to vector I’ve never ever got on with illustrator as it’s alway seemed a million miles away from the the photoshop interface. A while ago I played with Freeverse’s Lineform app about the time it first came out and found it to be incredibly easy to use.
To start with today I was using Vector Designer, which is another simple vector app which I had lying around as it had come as part of a software bundle. However I was finding it to be a touch limiting and when I was looking to align nodes in a path I couldn’t find a way to do that. Hitting that block made me think of Lineform and so I instantly downloaded the demo to give it a spin.
Overall, Lineform has a lot finer grained controls for vector objects and I found it’s also very intuitive - the gradient tools in particular are wonderful. It also follows mac interface conventions well which always makes one feel at home. Whilst I also like Inkscape (which is an open source vector application) I do find it’s interface quite clunky in comparison. Additionally it only currently runs under x11 which makes it less that ideal on a mac. Whilst Inkscape is clearly extremely powerful in the right hands (definitely not mine!) there’s a lot to be said for stripped down interfaces that help you get what you need to do done. It’s in this department that Lineform excels. That being said Inkscape is well worth a look as an alternative - and it’s free so you can’t say fairer than that!
The one downside I found with Line form is that the control over type seems slightly limited in some specific areas (I particularly found there doesn’t seem to be an interface which provides control over horizontal letter spacing). Despite this I would say it’s a very compentent app for getting vector work done efficiently, especially considering how much it costs. The current price is a reasonable $79 and if like me the low value of the pound is biting hard then there’s currently a $30 discount if you enter “lineform30″ at the checkout.
Posted in General, social on 4th December 2008, 11:01 pm by Stuart
(SVG Long Tail Diagram by Hay Kranen via Wikipedia)
BitTorrent is a highly useful technology that helps to share the burden of many people getting access to content available from the internet by distributing the load via a P2P network.
The big problem with bittorrent is that it’s not great at providing access the Long Tail of content. Before we continue here’s a very brief overview of the Long Tail. If you’ve not had the chance to read Chris Anderson’s book - The Long Tail - I’d highly recommend it.
The definition of the Long Tail comes from a measurement of popularity as shown in the diagram above. The left hand side show the items that are most popular - think chart hits if you’re talking in terms of music. The right-hand part of the curve in the diagram above is the Long Tail. The Long Tail represents lots of niche choices (Any obscure or rare album would fit if in our musical example).
The reason why the Long Tail is important is that millions and millions of individual sales of products from the Long Tail adds up to a lot of money. Even if each item’s own popularity is minimal. The Internet makes the Long Tail market more of a success due to the fact of virtually infinite shelf space. Again sticking to music as an example if you’re offering downloads then you can afford to offer lots of niche albums as the cost of having them available is negligible. Where physical, finite shelf space is concerned you are only going to find more popular titles as shops need to stock what they know they can sell.
Bittorrent is not well suited to surfacing Long Tail content because Bittorrenting relies on there being someone who is seeding the data. For head content such this is not a problem - as popularity ensures the availability. However, if you’re trying to track down niche content - you might well find a torrent but you’ll find there’s no-one seeding the content in which case you lose.
BitTorrent cannot provide as much choice available to other means of distribution which is kind of strange as you often think of Bittorrent as providing endless choice at your fingertips - if you have mainstream tastes then it will work for you, if you don’t your satisfaction might be more limited.
Bittorrent is great for popular content where demand is high. It’s distributed approach makes it possible for large chunks of content to be made available to lots of people at once. As such for fresh and popular content it can be the perfect means of distribution but by virtue of how it works it will always cater more towards the head content.
Posted in Music, Tech on 3rd December 2008, 10:31 pm by Stuart
Amazon’s Mp3 store is now available in the UK which is great news. They seem to have a lot of tracks and albums available and track pricing is variable but seems tio start at the 69p which undercuts Apple’s iTunes music store by quite a bit.
Amazon’s tracks are DRM free tracks which means that you will always have access to your music. Whereas DRM tracks could become unplayable should the DRM service be switched off in the future. Think it won’t happen? Sadly there’s been several cases of DRM services being shutdown. MSN and Yahoo have both shut-down DRM based services in the past so it’s a big problem potentially. Clearly if Amazon can negotiate their way around the DRM problem companies like Apple should be able to just as well. (Granted apple does have the iTunes Plus tracks which are DRM free but this is a Minor subset of their overall catalogue.)
Album pricing seems to start at around £3.00 which is surprisingly aggressive, and it’s good to see major players like iTunes getting some decent competition. Also right now there seems to be lots of recently released albums available for £3.00 such as the Kings Of Leon album - Only By The Night. Can’t really complain at paying £3.00 for that. It’s £7.99 on the iTunes store.
The bit-rate is 256 kbps and whilst this is ok it would be good to see this upped in the future. Also I’d personally love to see the addition of open lossless formats such as flac. Though I can see that this possibly has a limited audience.
To download the tracks a software downloader is required but crucially this is available for OSX, windows and Linux. Purchasing a track is straight forward enough - a download of a .amz file is triggered which you open with the downloader and it proceeds to download the tracks.
Provided their music catalogue continues to grow to match their CD market I’m pretty sure Amazon’s UK mp3 offering will be a success. And Apple needs to start to wake up to this competition - whilst alternative mp3 services such as 7Digitial might not be widely known to the average Joe - Amazon is well known and anyone who uses amazon is likely to find the mp3 store pretty quickly if they’d not already heard of it.
Generally these days I’m tending to access mysql from the CLI but when writing a data importer script I needed to be able to see what tables I was accessing from two different dbs. Initially I was looking for an ERD tool but I stumbled across the successor to CocoaMysql, Sequel Pro. It’s both well executed and free which makes it my kind of app!
Robert Nyman has released a new and improved version of his inline js finder which now also locates inline styling as well as JavaScript. Inline code finder is a great way of identifying the kind of code that should always be avoided. More details can be found at Robert’s site. Plugins are available as standalone Firefox and Firebug extensions.
