rob’s blog

My friend Dave Peixotto is in charge of coding and software repository work on our iPhone application development.  I am in charge of the marketing and business aspects of our software company, Neutrinos, LLC.

One of my tasks with the release of our recently submitted iPhone application, TipTotaler was to select an icon for our app.  As you may be aware from Apple’s iPhone application submission guidelines, you must include a flat 57 x 57 pixel and 512 x 512 pixel image for use on the iPhone and iPod Touch home screen and for the iTunes store.

There are a couple of challenges for iPhone Application icon graphic designers:  First, it isn’t always easy to tell what will look good at both 512×512 and 57×57.  Second, having the developer rebuild and send updated screenshots is laborious as is monkeying around in Photoshop to eyeball how the images look at lower resolution with 3D effects.

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Radiohead may know music–but they and their management do not know digital downloads. In trying to be artsy, buying In Rainbows was confusing and clunky. When it came time to download, they couldn’t handle the traffic. I found that particularly startling because a band with that kind of IT budget should have been able to get a decently distributed web server set up in 10 days.

Anyhow, three cheers for Saul Williams and his management for connecting with Musicane on the pre-order of his new album Niggy Tardust. (Yes, that is a racially charged album title. This guy has some pretty serious stuff to say to you.)

Musicane’s system for doing the pre-order was the slickest I’ve seen yet, offering a pre-order download of the 192kbps version for free or you could pay $5 and have access to 192kbps, 300kbps, or FLAC. I paid the $5 and it was worth it! Continue Reading »

[Updated 10/31/07, see bottom of post]

I had a professor ask me for more information on what made OiNK special and what it was all about. I assembled the following information for him:

Why Oink Was Special

• The community was very tightly controlled:
  • Only albums that had a certain level of audio quality (192kbps+) were allowed to be uploaded. Albums had to fit a stringent set of criteria such as being original rips from real CDs, and not “transcodes.” A transcode is a song that has been ripped to mp3, decoded back to wav, and then re-encoded to an mp3. This was despite the fact that many feel double compression is not noticeable to the ear.
  • All torrents had to fulfill certain basic requirements such as a complete tracklisting. A basic description, accurate meta data, cover art scans and a playlist file were highly encouraged and more often than not taken care of by the uploader.
• The community was self-policing and highly active. Torrents of albums were uploaded weeks sometimes months in advance of their official date. High profile albums were combed over very quickly and rejected if either they appeared to be transcodes or had been doctored in any way.

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I’ve been playing more and more nexus of technology and entertainment. I realized during my trip in Vegas that it is no longer okay to not have a business card to exchange. I printed these up using Avery’s 28877 Clean Edge business cards and Anne’s Deskjet 5160. Here’s the front (Some info obfuscated):

And the Back: Continue Reading »

I needed a new flyer for my obsessive-compulsive Dave Matthews Band fan site.  I have some obsessive fans on the board who are willing to help promote the site at shows.  They’re like the Jehova’s Witnesses of the DMB fan community.

I ran across a flyer for an old Dropkick Murphys / Sex Pistols show and decided it might be a good hack possibility. 

Here’s the original:

 

Click here for full size 

 And here’s my hack:

 

Click here for full size 

Interestingly, I did all of the editing in Fireworks.  I would have preferred to use photoshop, but it was not starting at that time.  (Installed CS2, to replace junky old CS1)

Long-story short, I am a sa-weet image editor.  And I’m fun at parties.