ascagnel

A few notable things from around the Internet, while I get the time:

• 9to5Mac reports that there will be a new Maps app for iOS 6. If it doesn’t have turn-by-turn navigation, what’s the point of all the 3D junk? Nobody uses that for any length of time.
• On the iOS beat, the beta for v6 is expected soon. Makes sense, with WWDC coming up.
• iCloud will be a complete failure if they keep per-app document silos and Mac-only. The great thing about Dropbox is that it’s available everywhere and makes your files available on all manner of devices and apps.
• Windows 8 is going to be thoroughly meh. A tablet/touchscreen didn’t work with a desktop UI (remember XP for Tablets?), and a desktop will have a slightly better result with a touchscreen UI.
• As for the tablets, it’ll be interesting. Microsoft tends to do well when it can leverage its existing Windows install base, and making apps available on all three platforms will turn at least a few heads.
• Google+ got a redesigned iOS app, and the Android app is expected to follow within a few weeks. It’s fluid, quick, and has some nice animations to cover it’s brief load times. If a social network’s success were defined by it’s mobile app, this would blow Facebook out of the water.
• Facebook, your app is terrible. Stop adding features and try to speed up your APIs. And why the hell do you keep randomly sending me to the “nearby” screen whenever the app slows down?

This review contains unmarked spoilers for the first book.

While The Hunger Games was an eye-opening experience, I can’t say the same for its followup, Catching Fire. THG was everything you don’t expect from a piece of “young adult” literature — violent, brash, and very raw, and most of those elements have been toned down in the process of further developing an overarching story.

Our hero, Katniss Everdeen, spent almost all of THG in the throes of the titular Hunger Games, a bloody battle royale among the youths of Panem, with the twelve districts each offering a male and female Tribute for the enjoyment of the Captial. This post-apocalyptic (or maybe just dark future) government uses the games as both a threat and a means to pacify the population. The threat is obvious: your children, or your brothers and sisters, are at risk. The pacification, as with any good science fiction novel (notably, The Running Man) in this subgenre, is the bloodlust of the people. However, in somewhat surprising turn, Katniss and her male counterpart from District 12, Peeta, are both allowed to leave after they threaten to both commit suicide, Romeo and Juliet-style.

Catching Fire begins with Katniss and Peeta embarking on a victor’s tour of the districts, and while on this tour discover that violent revolution, following years of oppression, is on the verge of breaking out. Katniss is held up as a hero for this movement, without her knowledge, as she dared to defy the government by threatening to kill her and Peeta.

Upon returning from the tour, Gale, the third part of the love triangle, factors in even more. Katniss first draws up plans to run away from the District, fearing for her life and the safety of her family, and eventually decides to foment the rebellion.

One of the better points of Catching Fire is how the Katniss-Gale-Peeta love triangle begins to have greater significance. Gale, her first love, is a great representation of her running away and returning to her life before the Hunger Games, while Peeta takes the role of pushing her towards open rebellion. That the individual characters are expanded on (Gale is receives much more development in THG and little screen time here), and are interesting in their own way, makes the love triangle work better than it might have in other novels.

[A brief note: spoilers follow. Its impossible to discuss the second half of the book without it]

Where Catching Fire takes its most disappointing turn is at the start of the “Quarter Quell”, a quadricentennial celebration of the Hunger Games. This is only the third Quarter Quell (which makes you wonder why it took seventy-four years for someone to pull a Romeo and Juliet moment), and the rules for the battle royale are altered significantly. In this case, the Tributes must be previous victors, so Katniss is forced back into the Games once again. The means by which Katniss is pushed back into the games is a good one, but I’m wary of the third book and whether or not it’ll push her into the games for a ludicrous third time.

The biggest issue was the ending. With less than 15 pages to go, the story takes a huge lurch that had only been ever-so-slightly hinted at. Even worse, the hooks for the turn were only laid down in this novel. The entire ending felt like it was just set up for the third and final book, and left more hanging than what it answered. Worst of all is that the typically bleakest point in a series is not very bleak at all.

[Spoilers end]

Catching Fire was a good enough book. It wasn’t great. It wasn’t as good as The Hunger Games, and if what everyone who has read all of them tell me is right, Mockingjay (the third book) will be better still.

parislemon:

A week ago, I came home after a long night of drinking and wanted to vomit. It wasn’t the whiskey. It was the email. 

I had been gone approximately 6 hours at an event and subsequent after-party. I didn’t check my email the entire time. When I came home, I had over 50 new emails in my inbox (this doesn’t include the ones I automatically archive thanks to Gmail filters). 50-some emails all of which I needed to take action on in some form or another.

Fuck.

Undoubtedly aided by the aforementioned drinks, I hit “Select All” and debated hitting “Delete”. Not just for those 50-some emails. But for all 50,000+ that were sitting un-archived in my inbox. Then I thought better of it. Instead, I hit “Archive”.

Best thing I’ve ever done. 

Read More

Email itself may not be the be-all, end-all of modern communications, but it has some major virtues that aren’t worth giving up:

• It’s an open standard, so anyone can make a mail client that can talk to any other mail client.
• It operates in plain text.
• It can be easily encrypted for point-to point privacy.
• It can be distilled into individual files or bulk archive files, making backups and restoration fairly easy.
• Everyone can have a single address to which all mail arrives, but you can go further and use specific extensions (Gmail’s “+”) for automated messages.

What we don’t need is a means of communication to replace email. What really needs to happen is a major rethink of the clients we use to interact with our mail. Hotmail changed messaging with its browser client. Outlook delivered push messaging. Gmail introduced the importance of a good search along with the ability to multi-context a single message via labels (vs folders).

If anything happens to email, I’d say the best thing to do is to strip out as much of the formatting and HTML extensions that were added by “rich” clients. Another would be to have clients require private-key encryption as part of the setup process so email can’t be read in transit. Keep everything as simple as possible, and let clients focus on bubbling up useful features.