Converting to Retina
These are my personal recommendations for making the switch to a high-DPI website. 1. Step one: stop working at 72 DPI This one is for the designers: get into the practice of doing everything at high-DPI. If you are working in Photoshop, get to know and love shape layers and the path tool, even for [...]
Google Analytics for Backbone Apps
When you build a single-page web app with something like Backbone driving routes and managing browser history, the page load event is only going to happen once at the beginning of the session. The standard Google Analytics javascript snippet doesn't work so well for these single-page apps. You should trigger an Analytics event when the [...]
Stupid Refactoring
Refactoring is fun. You get to make your code cleaner, more abstract, reusable. There's a certain type of refactoring that you should think twice about, though, and that's refactoring design. Abstraction is meant to make things more reusable so that future changes are easier. Or, creating an abstraction may by itself make the code easier [...]
How To Foster Communication in an International Tech Company
If you have a big company with engineers in many time zones, you need to lay down the law regarding realtime communication. This is not about email or phone calls, because email is too asynchronous (you don't stare at your email waiting for responses) and phone calls are too synchronous (calls are either scheduled or [...]
Double-Click-Through
"Click-through" is a term for being able to interact with buttons and controls on a background application without clicking first to activate it. Click-through is normally disabled in OS X. There are some exceptions where the first click is active, like iTunes player buttons, Safari UI, and Chrome UI (but not active webpage content area). [...]
Spotify vs. Grooveshark
It's On Like Donkey Kong
Music Streaming Snapshot
Monthly Users According to Facebook - February 2012 Service Launch Date Monthly Users % Change Spotify Oct 2008 15,800,000 +20% Pandora Jan 2000 9,200,000 +3% SoundCloud Oct 2008 3,100,000 +24% Bandcamp Sep 2008 1,200,000 +21% Grooveshark Jan 2006 1,100,000 0% Slacker Jun 2007 150,000 0% MOG Dec 2009 140,000 -30% Rdio Aug 2010 100,000 +43% [...]
Universal's Audible Watermark
Update, April 8, 2013: Can you hear it? Take a watermark listening test. A while ago I posted about my confusion regarding Weird Spotify Compression Artifacts. It turns out the artifacts are not due to compression, but a result of audio watermarks that Universal Music Group embeds in digitally distributed tracks. The artifacts appear on [...]
WFS Paper Presented at AES 131
I presented a short paper derived from my thesis work at the 131st Convention of the Audio Engineering Society in New York City. The paper is titled Wave Field Synthesis in Three Dimensions by Multiple Line Arrays. The paper focuses on subjective assessment of a modification to traditional wave field synthesis. I met Dr. Frank [...]
Mac OS X Speech Synthesis Markup
I put a Sound Blaster 16 in my first computer. It came with a CD-ROM full of goodies like Dr. Sbaitso, the talking psychologist. One app was called TextAssist and it had a special syntax that let you string together phonemes, specifying pitch, duration, even vibrato. I spent hours composing weird robot jingles. Itsy Bitsy [...]