Mark.KirstenAndMark.com

To start the new year, I’ve re-arranged my audio equipment, added some new hardware into the mix and started using Ableton Live. Here’s the result of me learning how to use Live:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I’ve also got some some other stuff I’ve been working on that really deserves its own post, but I’ll toss it in here anyway seeing as it’s already a few weeks old and that my last post here was in April.

After reading this tweet by Jason Herskowitz who I met at a gathering after Music Hack Day – Boston, I decided to give it a shot and came up with this:

http://music.mashthe.net/filtered_chart.php

If you’ve got a last.fm account, just enter your user name and select the length of time you’d like to see a chart for. If you don’t have an account, feel free to check out my chart.

When the page loads, you can then quickly filter the album chart by release year. Just grab the slider handles and drag them to select the years you want (0 means that last.fm doesn’t know the release year for the album). You can also hover over the years to see which albums were released in that year or grab the html of the chart so you can embed it on your site.

Here are my top albums from 2009 that were released in 2009 (minus a few that weren’t picked up because the tags didn’t match the entries that last.fm had year info for):

Artwork by The Used (2009)

Fantasies by Metric (2009)

Kingdom of Welcome Addiction by IAMX (2009)

Invaders Must Die by The Prodigy (2009)

Sub Focus by Sub Focus (2009)

Fever Ray by Fever Ray (2009)

No more stories Are told today I’m sorry They washed away No more stories The world is grey I’m tired Let’s wash away by Mew (2009)

21st Century Breakdown by Green Day (2009)

Live At Brixton Academy by Pendulum (2009)

Travel the Galaxy by Ed Rush & Optical (2009)

Swoon by Silversun Pickups (2009)

Crash Love by AFI (2009)

1 by Triobelisk (2009)

A List Apart has posted their 2008 survey – “The Survey for People Who Make Websites”. If you are a web worker, go take it. It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes:

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve been trying to take better advantage of our neighborhood’s walkability. Our place has a Walk Score of 72 out of 100. Not quite as good as our last place (which had a 92 out of 100), but still very walkable. Of course, we didn’t take much advantage of the walkability of our last apartment, so it didn’t do us much good. Last Friday we walked to dinner 1.2 miles away – there are some places that are closer that we’ve walked to a couple times before, but there are quite a few more places when we open the range to 1-1.5 miles. I also signed up for a gym that’s .8 miles away and doesn’t have a very good parking situation – encouraging me to walk. There really is quite a bit of stuff within just a few miles of us. My office is only 2 miles from our apartment, I really should start getting myself there without a 2,800 pound machine around me, at least some of the time.

In case you didn’t see the post already, we’ve got our hands full with our new arrival, so this week will be brief. You may find something interesting in the Adobe Developer Week sessions (March 24 – March 28). I’ve registered for the following 4 sessions:

• Building Rich Internet Applications with Flex 3

• Building AIR Applications with Flash CS3

• Dreamweaver: Effective Standards-based Workflows for Ajax

• The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP

I just finished watching the Mix08 Keynote with Steve Ballmer and was thinking about how IE8 will affect my web development workflow. The short answer is that it won’t significantly, but I hope the effects will be dramatic. I’ll still start building the site with TextMate and get it working in Firefox (along with the amazing Firebug) on my Mac. I’ll probably still look at the page in Safari and maybe Opera, but honestly, if it works in Firefox, it’s probably going to be just fine in both. At this point in the process, I should be about 90% done, but then I have to make things work in IE (which is where the second 90% gets added on). First, I’ll test in the version of IE I have installed on my windows machine (IE7), then test in IE8 in a virtual machine (currently I check in IE6 in a virtual machine).

The only thing different will be that I’m testing in IE8 instead of IE6 and will hopefully have a lot fewer CSS hacks and/or conditional comments in my finished product (because when IE8 ships, I’m cutting off IE6 – immediately for personal projects, and hopefully no more than a few months later at my day job). If the “Emulate IE7″ feature in IE8 works perfectly, I’ll also upgrade my (non VM) IE install to IE8 and will be able to eliminate the VM step. Assuming IE8 is really as standards compliant as it’s supposed to be, that little switch could mean cutting out that second 90% of the time it takes to make a cross-browser site. I can’t see the developer tools they’re introducing taking over what Firebug does anytime soon (though I’d love to see their tools get that good), so I don’t really see IE becoming my first-pass browser. Also, since there won’t be a Mac version, I won’t be able to run it natively in my OS of choice.

I will say that I am excited that MS seems to finally be making intelligent decisions when it comes to the web. The recent announcement that IE8 will behave like IE8 by default and their commintment to web standards are huge leaps for them. I’m hopeful that momentum continues. I’d love to stop spending half of my front-end development effort on a broken browser.