I’ve just recently handed in an ICA for one of my university modules, Advanced Multimedia Development. The brief was to create a flash application to inspire and enthuse 16-18 year olds into studying music.

Here’s a screenshot of what I came up with;

Bearing in mind that it is a prototype and as such is a little buggy on the ‘Create’ page the link to the project is here: ama prototype

Further Development

My next assignment in the module is to develop the full flash application. Since I haven’t really had a chance to experiment with php & MySql I’m going to use those to store and retrieve the content for the flash app. All of my content (where appropriate) will be loaded in dynamicaly and I’m planning on adding save functionality to the create page. The ‘See’ page (I think it should be ‘Listen’ really) is going to show songs other people have made on the ‘Create’ page.

If I have time I’m also going to add more instruments to the creation page and let you choose how long the song is going to be. Hopefully users should be able to create some quite cool tunes on the finished app.

It’s about that time of the year, it looks like there aren’t really any other albums coming out this year worth noting so it’s time for my favourite albums of 2008

Metronomy - Nights Out

1

Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours

2

Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

3

Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

4

Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles

5

Hot Chip - Made In The Dark

6

Kings of Leon - Only By The Night

7

The Futureheads - This Is Not The World

8

Beck - Modern Guilt

9

Laura Marling - Alas I Cannot Swim

10

Honourable Mentions: The Presets - Apocalypso, MGMT -
Oracular Spectacular, Friendly Fires - Friendly Fires, The Foals - Antidotes.

What do you think? Anything I’ve missed?

The new Kings of leon album has been leaked onto the net and not that I downloaded it its brilliant! I’ve already pre-ordered it and its money well spent. Kings of Leon are consistently releasing amazing albums; I don’t think I can name many other bands with four consecutive albums that have been this good. Highlites on the album from first listen are; ‘Sex On Fire’, ‘Crawl’ and probably my favourite ‘Use Somebody’.

The album is being released officially on the 22rd of September and have announced a UK arena tour for the following dates;

• December 1st - Brighton Centre 
• December 2nd - Nottingham Trent FM Arena
• December 4th - Newcastle Metro Arena
• December 5th - Sheffield Arena
• December 7th - Glasgow SECC
• December 8th - Liverpool Echo Arena
• December 10th - Birmingham NIA
• December 11th - London O2 Arena
• December 14th - Bournemouth BIC
• December 16th - Manchester Evening News Arena
• December 17th - Cardiff International Arena

Now I know its very late to be writing an article about the Hype Machine but I’ve actually only just noticed the dashboard bit on the site where you can listen to your favourite songs. It’s brilliant, In the last two days I’ve found so many good tracks and since you can see what I’ve listened to, I may as well give you the link. My station thingy can be found here along with a load of great tracks, if anyone else has got an account, give me a comment and I’ll have a listen.

At the moment my songs are a bit electro/dance orientated with songs from Justice, Soulwax, Metronomy (I can’t wait for their new album!), some excellent mashups with the Beatles/Kraftwerk and some SebastiAn.

I think when I have some spare time I’m going to extend the Beatles/Kraftwerk mix so that I can play it while djing, it needs an intro and outro. I think I might play it in my set in one of the dance tents at leeds festival too.

This is the current version
Tour Da Elenor Rigby (Soulwax Remix)

I’ll upload my extended mix when its done.

It’s been three years now since Mozilla announced support for CSS column control and I am yet to see any sites using it. I am aware of course that until there is widespread support for CSS3 and that I shouldn’t expect to see much usage of column-count, column-width and column-gap, but no sites? Surely someone has had a play.
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In the words of me with not much to do; “woop woop woop, my new website is nearly quite half way done!”. The site has got a brand spanking new look as well as the bloggy bit i’m writing on now. Still left to do is the portfolio page (showing off some of my work), an about me page (10 points for guessing who that page is about) and a resources bit where I’ll be posting some tools I’ve been working on as well as some useful links, free icon sets etc.

The new design is mainly inspired I love Typography (interesting articles about guess what), BearSkinRug (the personal website for illustator and designer Kevin Cornell) and A List Apart (a really good blog on everything from web standards to design). Erm, yeah… Thats three links that I already need to add to the non-existant resources page so that one is already going quite well.

Any comments on the new design would be groovy. In fact any nearly legible ramblings at all would be brilliant for the first post of my new site. PS: How is your dog?