December 2012

grey with rounded corners

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tweet_design2

I know, I know, the grey space is supposed to be a "header" and you're supposed to decorate it with your own or others' designs. Twitter wants you to have a header so bad they're holding the space for ransom with this hideous charcoal slab. As with 99% of web design it was fine before they improved it -- just a thin wedge of text next to your avatar telling who you are. The initial appeal of twitter was its simplicity, but Rule One of web design is start simple, gradually fill up space with crap.

all your tweets in a single dynamite download

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Twitter is apparently rolling out a settings feature that allows you to download your tweets as a single download.

This won't be very useful for me since I've been manually archiving my twit-spewings for the last three years. I started doing it because the search and pageback functions were so lousy, and just kept up the practice. The tweets were supposed to be my notes and I do use the self-archive pretty regularly to find something I jotted down.

Insta-Ad

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Financial blogger Barry Ritholtz discusses upcoming changes to Instagram (the popular "app" that adds arty filters to cellphone photo-sharing):

Facebook will be adding advertisements into Instagram’s application — and you and your kids may be part of them. From the NYT Bits blog, here are the changes in Instagram’s privacy policy that you should be aware of:

1. Instagram can share information about its users with Facebook, its parent company, as well as outside affiliates and advertisers.

2. You could star in an advertisement — without your knowledge.

3. Underage users are not exempt.

4. Ads may not be labeled as ads.

5. Want to opt out? Delete your account.

Sweet.

"Fragmentary Flautist"

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"Fragmentary Flautist" [mp3 removed]

The previous track featured a synthesized quasi-flute. This one has an enthusiastic flute sample that I took apart and plopped into a variety of genre contexts. (Dub, electro, nu-jazz, etc)
The 2010s equivalent of "digging in the crates" is mining hard drives, CDs, and compact flash cards for the zillions of copyright-risk-free samples available for the home producer. There's some tasty stuff in there.