Flicker Fusion

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 ↩︎

New AT&T smart phone data plans are a mix of practicality and bullshit

New AT&T smart phone data plans are a mix of practicality and bullshit

Honestly, I don’t have a problem with getting rid of the unlimited plan, it seems fair to meter the data hogs that are sucking down more than their fair share. What’s bullshit, though, is the extra $20/month I’m going to have to pay for tethering – why am I paying an ongoing fee to share my connection when I’m already paying for metered bandwidth. If I stay below my 2GB/month limit, why does AT&T care how I get there? It’s just ones and zeros, whether I’m on an iPhone, iPad or Macbook. If I’m using more than that, it seems fair to pay for extra bandwidth but not for the privilege of connecting.