Nexus 7

In a moment of giddiness following the Android coding introduction I took at iOSDevUK, I ordered a Google Nexus 7. I've had it for a few weeks now (and, no, still haven't written any code for it), so here are a few of my current thoughts regarding it.

The bottom line is that I like it. I like the 7" form factor and I like the Jelly Bean system software. I don't think that, as a whole, it is better than the iPad, but it is definitely better in some ways and overall getting closer. It has replaced the iPad for most of my second-screen needs, and in particular I find it much better for reading eBooks. The screen isn't quite iPad 3 quality, but the difference isn't so great as to be noticeable, and the difference in weight more than makes up for it. (I chiefly use the Kindle app rather than iBooks, meaning that all my purchased books are synced between both devices.)

So... First impressions. Which were terrible. I was greeted by the screen you see below.

Would you look at that? A Michael Bay film (which doesn't actually exist — as all right-thinking people know, there was only ever one Transformers movie made and that stared Orson Welles and Eric Idle) and a Jeffrey Archer book. Seriously, Google, what the hell are you trying to do to me?

Joking aside, the real first impression of the Nexus 7 came from the screen which offered to set up the device with all my Google accounts. I thought I had unchecked this option when I ordered, but there on the first screen was my Google username and a prompt for my password. (Perhaps that was the difference — by unchecking that option, I had to manually start the setup process myself.)

For a lot of people, their first interaction with Jelly Bean will be entering their wifi password. This is the bit where you discover the default keyboard is disappointing compared to the iPad's and that the beep it makes on every key press is incredibly annoying. You can, of course, replace it with a third party keyboard. And here you have both the advantage and disadvantage of Android in a nutshell: the power to configure the system to your liking traded off against a less than optimal default setup.

There is a lot to prefer in Android over iOS. In many places it feels far more of an integrated whole. There are also times when it can be downright baffling. The behaviour of the system-wide back button is one such place. These two are related, as they're to do with the way individual parts of apps can be chained together and called from one another. So for instance, the Facebook app may open a page in Chrome which instantly pulls up the YouTube app to display a video. Hitting the back button will let you work backwards through this stack to return to the Facebook app. Unless you stop to interact with, say, Chrome on your way through, at which point the back button will start working back through Chrome's history. Or something. Like I said: confusing.

I can't really say what the Nexus 7 is like as a tablet, because so many of the apps I've tried are basically the phone version displayed on a large screen — or larger screen, since Android phone screens are already creeping up into the far end of big. The lack of polish is also noticeable, even in big name apps. IMDB is one of the most professional-looking I've tried, and even there the rough edges are evident, such as in the image gallery view, where you swipe the screen to flick between photos. There's no smooth page-to-page scrolling, no smooth transitions, no inertial scrolling through lists — none of the little features which are so easy for iOS developers to implement and which make such a difference to the user experience. In fact, it's sad to say that most of the apps with the best UX are direct un-Android copies of their iOS equivalents.

But in all, and for its price, the Nexus 7 is a great device. Hopefully it will inspire developers to create some great tablet apps to make best use of its features. (And since I would argue that Android tablets are a distinct market to Android phones I hope we will see it becoming worth those developers' time to do so.) I wouldn't recommend anyone get it instead of an iPad, unless they're on a very tight budget, but I'd certainly suggest you take a look at it if you were, for instance, considering a Kindle (or have given up waiting for the Kindle Fire to appear in the UK).

Untranslatable

This list of untranslatable words collected by Fuchsia Macaree — tweeted by Polly — lead me to see whether I could fit them all into a single narrative. I wonder how much sense it makes before you read the definitions. (And, yes, I know I missed one.)

For a little while she let the craic of the foka enfolder her. The renao company of friends, the swapping of istories me arkoudes. And Steven. The mamihlapinatapai across the table, the yuanfen almost tangible.

But the conversation turned to politics, as was its inevitable want. A magazine was passed around, its cover extolling the man's imagined virtues. He was a snorker, she thought. She could tell from his eyes. He had a backpfeifengesich and a bad case of age-tori. She knew his type. Incapable of xinku, a stranger to gigil, it was the poshlost of men like him which had bred the qualunquismo so prevalent in her generation back home. Which had ultimately caused her to flee the janteloven of that same homeland. To abandon it, and with it the dozywocie.

All at once she no longer felt herself among friends. The desire for uitwaaien forced her to her feet. She left the cafe and wandered into the nearby park. Under the komorebi she closed her eyes and let the waldeinsamkeit wash over her, a feeling as refreshing as oppholdsvœr, as pleasurable as hanyauku.

At the edge of the park was a neidbau, bedecked in neon, casting a chill finger of shadow across the neighbouring buildings. She climbed to its roof and stood looking out across the tops of the trees. It had been a mistake to come to this city. She would never learn its ways, no matter how long she stayed. She wondered what changes she needed to make to herself, what alterations she would have to adopt, to fit in. She imagined that somewhere there was an alternative her, a her who had once, long ago, chosen to walk a slightly different path, who would be at home amongst this strangeness. L'appel du vide took hold of her, pulling her inexorably towards the edge of the roof, feet shuffling slowly closer to the drop.

A noise from behind broke the spell. She turned and tartled, then bit down hard against the zhargzharg as from out of the shadows stepped her eidolon.

Batman Ends

Back in the early 90s, around the time I was at college, Radio 1 — rather randomly — broadcast an adaptation of the Batman storyline Knightfall. While I didn't expect The Dark Knight Rises to be a faithful retelling of this, I felt that the similarities meant it would provide at least a good point of comparison. I came out the other side rather disappointed.

Knightfall represents what I think is one of the major strengths of long-running comic book series: namely, the massive cast of supporting characters the writer has to play with. Batman is faced with a rogue's gallery of villans, and has to call — however reluctantly — on his allies to aide him. The Dark Knight Rises took a different route, in large parts being about Bruce Wayne battling his inner demons. Taking on the Big Bad is left to the secondary characters — mostly Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who thankfully is starting to not look like a teenager — with Batman only reappearing deus ex machina at the last moment.

Is The Dark Knight Rises a good film in the context of Nolan's Batman trilogy? I'm not sure. It's cluttered and confused, and suffers from the Doctor Who problem of thinking that you need to set the stakes really high — OMG they're going to nuke Gotham! — to build dramatic tension. Bane's Occupy Gotham plan doesn't really make much sense, feeling like an attempt to crowbar in some clumsy social commentary, and the Nolan boys seemingly couldn't resist throwing in a couple of random twist endings.

Anne Hathaway is by far the best thing in the film, but then — Halle Berry aside — you can't really go wrong with the character of Catwoman. And there, I think, lies the problem with the film. It doesn't have enough superheroes and supervillans in it. The gradual darkening and grittyfication of Batman over the years shows that it's perfectly possible to keep all that is great and escapist about the genre while ditching the childish campness, but what Christopher Nolan has attempted to do here is make a superhero flick without the superhero. And it's all turned out a bit of a disappointment.

Spider-Man Starts

As someone once pointed out — probably over at IO9 — the main problem with comic book adaptations is that they usually end up being origin stories. Despite having decades of plot lines and a pantheon of supporting characters to draw upon, the movie studios seem compeled by the need to introduce the superhero to their audience. These tales are seldom the most interesting there are to tell.

So here we are again, ten short years after Toby Maguire first donned the red and blue spandex, introducing a new generation to a new Spider-Man. I guess it gives Andrew Garfield something to do until the inevitable Andy Murray biopic (which has been posponed for another year due to the dour Scot's inability yet again to provide the requisite happy ending). This new Spider-Man is less emo than Maguire's — which isn't hard: there are suicides in eyeliner factories which are less emo than Maguire's Spider-Man — and more of a sk8r boi.

And, well, that's about it. Martin Sheen at least made the character of Uncle Ben memorable, Denis Leary is alright as Commissioner Gordon, and Rhys Ifans, you feel, is always tottering on the edge of suddenly being hilarious and Welsh, but never is. To my eternal embarrassment, my lack of comic book knowledge meant I spent most of the film thinking that the main bad guy was Killer Croc. (But given he was actually "The Lizard", an 'it's Friday afternoon so let's just think of something anything doesn't matter what and then go down the pub' kind of character name if ever I heard one, you can perhaps excuse me that.)

The mechanical web shooters were a nice touch — although probably one motivated by a desire to connect to the kids in the audience who haven't woken up one morning and suddenly found themselves able to shoot spider silk from their wrists — but it was never made clear whether it was the spider bite which kicked off Peter Parker's other super powers or whether they just coincidentally manifested themselves at that convenient point in the plot. Still, I guess if we want answers to this, and to the mysterious disappearance of Peter's parents, we'll just have to wait for the sequels.

iOSDevUK 2012

I spent last week in Aberystwyth, in the company of other iOS developers, for the second annual iOSDevUK meetup. I had a great time, meeting up with some old friends, making some new contacts, and attending some fascinating talks. A few quick thoughts:

• I understand that it's difficult to gauge the collective abilities of such a large group of attendees, but I found the technical level of most of the presentations pitched lower this year than last. The exceptions from the talks I attended included Chris Ross on 3D/OpenGL — which was probably just a basic introduction to a very difficult subject — and Chris Greening on multi-player games with GamesKit. Which isn't to say that the overall quality of speakers wasn't incredibly high.
• The lack of a barcamp this year was a pity. The meal on the first night could have used something to get everyone up and mixing about more.
• The game hack was a great idea, and I hope they run it again next year. I think I've learnt enough about team sizes to make it more fun next time, too.
• Offering an introduction to Android programming was a nice idea, and I think I learnt enough from it to get me over the initial conceptual barrier. It would have been nice if the instructors had known a little more about iOS development, since in this case that was where their students were coming from. A lot of confusion could have been cleared up by providing direct comparisons between platforms (eg. contrasting Activities with View Controllers).
• The stand-out surprise speaker (or at least surprise to me, but then I really should read the programme before attending next year) was Oscar winner Jan Pinkava, writer and co-director of "Ratatouille". He had apparently studied computer graphics and robotics as a postgrad student at the university with conference organiser Chris Price. A natural storyteller, Jan is a captivating speaker, and I'm sure that no one minded that he overran his allotted time slot by about an hour.

I look forward to attending again next year.

Write

You don't need to have been published to call yourself a writer. You don't need to have ever earned a penny from your words. You don't even need to have been read (although believe you me, being an unread writer is a soul-destroying pastime). But to be a writer you must, definitely, without fail, this isn't negotiable, write. The accreditation is fairly painless. As soon as you write that's it, you're a writer. And as soon as you stop, you aren't. So start writing and keep writing. Finish what you start. Plug away, even when you hate every word you write. You'll hate those words even more if you don't write them. That thing they say about writing being rewriting? It's true. Despite the similarities, you mustn't confuse writing with calligraphy. Don't expect a period of silent zen meditation, contemplating the perfect whiteness of the page, followed by a sudden burst of activity, a few deft strokes resulting in a perfect word or phrase. Writing is more like sculpting with clay. Take the words and pile them up, squish them together, squeeze them into the shape of the idea, the rough form of the story. Take a step back. Look at them from every angle. Now dive back in. Gouge out the unneeded words, push them around, work in the fine detail. Mould and scrape and shape. Get your hands dirty. Write.

Shop

There is a shop, somewhere. One day, quite by accident, you will find it. It will be in a city you've never visited before, down a small side street you won't ever be able to locate again. Maybe it's a book shop or an art gallery. Maybe it's a record store. You will feel yourself drawn to it. And on its shelves you will find copies of every book you never wrote. Hanging on its walls will be all the pictures you never painted. In its racks will be every song you never composed, played by every band you never formed. They will let you browse for a little while, the keepers of this shop. And then they will laugh you back outside. Don't try to buy anything. They won't let you. They'll tell you that you missed your chance, and then slam the door in your face, twisting the sign in the window over to CLOSED. So what can you do about it? You can act now to put them out of business. Leave no book unwritten, no picture unpainted, no song uncomposed. And then on that day, you will find the shop, and it will be shut up, nothing but dust in its windows, and you can pass by without giving it a second thought.

Prometheus

In the tradition of those who can, do; those who can't, teach; and those who can't even teach, review, here are a few thoughts on Prometheus.

I think the main point we can take away from both Prometheus and the upcoming Blade Runner sequel is that Ridley Scott's pension pot obviously wasn't performing as well as he would have liked, and needed a bit of topping up. There's nothing really wrong with this film. Scott is a great director, and it shows. The action is fast-paced and the performances are good. You can see and hear what's going on at all times. You never get a stray boom mike bobbing into view or catch a glimpse of the film crew in one of the many reflective surfaces. I'm sure if I'd seen it in 3D — instead of 2D, as god intended — things would have flown out of the screen at me in a very satisfying manner. It was all very competent.

There is a problem with prequels that they can borrow too heavily from the films which came before (after)(this could get confusing) them. In his encyclopaedic analysis of the Star Wars prequels — which as I'm sure you're aware were never made and so do not actually exist — Mr Plinkett points out that Luke and Obi Wan (and Uncle Owen and the bartender at the Mos Eisley cantina) dress the way they do because they live on a hick desert planet. Yet, come the prequels, these desert rags have been adopted as the official uniform of the Jedi. So it is with Prometheus. Maybe David playing basketball has nothing to do with the court scene from Resurrection, but we get the muster scene and the head-mounted cameras from Aliens, the sexually-threatening Android and the flamethrowers. Yet there's one notable absence...

Prometheus also borrows heavily from elsewhere, which is a shame given the strong, unique world which the original films created. As Kim Newman points out, the whole "ancient astronaut" plot has been done to death in SF over the decades since Alien. For my money, 2001 had already presented the definitive version of the story ten years before Alien was released. It also did the boredom of space travel far better. It's sad to see a franchise which originated so many quotable scenes resort to quoting other movies (David's obsession with Lawrence of Arabia). The SF props which make up its background have been drawn from far and wide. The autodoc practically asks you to please state the nature of the medical emergency. (And I'm going to come down on the side of, yes, a caesarian was what she meant to ask for.)

Since Wayland-Yutani-branded crates turn up in Firefly I guess it's only fair that the Prometheus herself should look like Serenity. There is plenty of random shiny gadgetry for the actors to stare at and poke whenever they need to do anything exciting. It makes you wonder exactly how old and backwards the Nostromo was. I wish they'd kitted the ship out with old clackety keyboards and green-screen monitors which clucked as the letters appeared. They could at least have edited out the "Where are you?"s as the character asking stands looking at a 3D map showing with flashing yellow diamonds exactly where everyone was. Also, it was a shame that Chekhov's Iron Man suits didn't get an outing, despite the number of time they were ran past.

(I also wonder about the choice of name "Prometheus" for the ship. (And as a quick aside, Mr Wayland, Prometheus wasn't so much "cast down" by the gods for bringing man fire as "chained to a rock and had his liver torn out on an infinite loop". Subtle difference there.) Something about the metaphor doesn't quite sit right. Personally, I would have kept the Prometheus theme for the aliens and called the ship "Pandora", after the wife the gods fashioned for him. It would be a little more apposite, given what we know about her tendency to open up cans of face-hugging chest-bursting worms.)

The film gets extra points for kicking off the main action on my 118th birthday. (Nice one, Ridders. I do appreciate little touches like that. Cheers.) Unfortunately, about ten minutes in, I'd convinced myself that "Elizabeth Shaw" was the name of Keira Knightley's character in those Pirate movies, and was composing a far more interesting film in my head. One where the feisty heroine swashbuckled her way past Space Jockeys and slime monsters.

Alien was a B-movie horror flick made a thing of beauty by brilliant design and direction. Prometheus... well, I'm not sure what it is, and I'm not sure if it knows, either. It's disappointing in the same way that 3 or Resurrection were when you learnt of the (limited) involvement of William Gibson or Joss Whedon, respectively. It could have been so much more than it was, but it ended up lacking something. And I don't just mean the Alien.

Soon

I GIMPed this up a few weeks back. I get very demotivated very quickly and needed something to keep my enthusiasm up.

This will be a micro-collection. I've already chosen the four stories it will contain (three of which are currently available over on my writing site), and these are with my editor for making readable. Once ready, I'll release it as a Kindle e-book, with a dead tree version (primarily for forcing copied on unwitting friends) to follow soon afterwards.

Of course, if this cover offends any of my Creative friends to the point that they'd like to step in and make me something better...

RIP The Book?

Among the many fascinating events which made up this year's Stoke Newington Literary Festival, "RIP The Book?" was one of the most interesting, not least because it intersected in a couple of places with my current interests.

China Miéville spoke first to reassure us that the linear narrative isn't going anywhere, which came as something of a relief. He went on to discuss the ways in which how those narratives are produces may evolve, touching on the idea of music-like remixes. This is something which we at Opuss have been working on for a while now. It will be interesting to see whether China — or his People — will allow his work to be available for treatment in this way.

There was some interesting musing on the subject of what form exactly a "book" would take, with the floor passing to Anna Rafferty, Managing Director of Penguin Digital, and a tech gnome from a company called Liquid something, whose name I didn't catch. This was the first time I'd been to any literary events, but I've attended lots of tech gatherings and there is something very striking in the differences between the approaches taken by speakers from the two worlds. Literary speakers seem to talk with an authority and directness which is missing in their tech counterparts, who seem to favour vague, hand-waving statements and almost-motivational promises. Unfortunately this was evident from these two panel members, as they asked us to imagine a future where children's imaginations were fired not by boring old books but by future wonders which incorporated interactive storytelling and what we used to call Multi Media. When the gnome declared that he "wasn't really interested in the words", China's arched eyebrow was a thing of evil beauty. (It also didn't help that, as another audience member observed on the way out, "he wasn't bloody using the microphone properly".)

(This kind of attitude is nothing new. I've witnessed it firsthand myself, when working on a poetry app at a former employer. Faced with some of the greatest, most powerful writing in the English language, Creatives and managers started flailing around for animated gewgaws to make the content "interesting".)

Some of the properties of these future books — such as the ability to look up the definition of words while reading — are already available in current e-readers. Others — such as interactivity, with stories taking different paths depending on user choice — are describing things which have existed for a long time and aren't actually books. Many of the examples were directed at children's books, where there has always been this kind of innovation (think pop-up books and fuzzy felt).

Between China and the tech people came Mark Billingham, who seems like a really nice bloke with a bee in his bonnet about self publishing, particularly in its digital form. This is something which I'm slowly creeping towards (sometime this year, definitely...) so was particularly interested in. Taking a deep breath to quell the initial wave of annoyance his comments provoked, I found myself agreeing with many of his points. Digital self publishing is easy, and as a result there are a great many books released which were written in weeks, with a cover knocked-up by the author's neighbour. Mark also has a problem with the low price these are sold at, and how they are clogging up the best seller lists (and presumably keeping his Professional books down). This raises two issues which weren't really touched on.

Firstly there's the question of who should be allowed to publish. China made a comment about Jeffry Archer, to make the point that the standards of professional publishing aren't necessarily that high. (I think the swath of celebrity "auto"-biographies may have been a better example of this.) If I had a chance, I would have liked to ask Mark who he thought the gatekeepers to being published should be. There are many stories of classic novels being rescued at the last minute from publishers' rejection piles. Is it right that a small number of individuals working for (in the majority of cases) primarily commercially-driven publishing companies should decide what makes it into print? (And here I'll admit that I'm going down the self-publishing route because I don't have the confidence that my writing would be accepted by a publisher. I've tried in the past and been rejected after months or years of waiting for a response. Now I'm going to take a chance and go directly to the readers and let them decide whether what I've written is any good.)

Secondly is the simple matter of taking pride in your work. There is no excuse for releasing work full of copy errors with a badly-designed cover. At the "How Soon is Now?" event, one of the pop-up panelists — whose name I think was Alex something but he was a late addition and isn't in the programme and I didn't quite catch it at the time and oh god am I going senile already? — described how he wasn't allowed a copy editor for the indie project he was working on, on the grounds that someone's wife had found a spelling mistake in one of the Harry Potter books. Anyone who doesn't put in the minimum effort of hiring professionals to fill in the gaps in their skills deserves a thousand one-star reviews. Hiring an editor isn't expensive (in the great scheme of things, especially compared to the amount of your own time you've put into writing) and should be the least you do. (Here I'm following the wonderful advice of David Gaughran in his book Let's Get Digital — if you're considering self publishing you really should read it.) To do otherwise is to devalue your own work, and to give naysayers like Mark extra ammunition.

(Mark also appeared to be showing the signs of advanced Stockholm syndrome when it came to his views on the agency pricing model, but I won't go into that. I think I need to refresh my understanding of the issue, because it seems strange for his views to be at such great odds with how I perceive the economics of the situation.)

In all, the "RIP The Book?" session provided tremendous food for thought and reflected the high quality of the Festival as a whole. I can't wait for next year. (And if the organisers are planning another similar event and are looking for a panelist with experience in both self publishing and the brave new tech world of words...)