We are developing an Android app. Of course, the natural thing to do is to add a splash screen. We did, but it sucked, so I googled how to do it well.

And then I found Splash Screens Are Evil, Don't Use Them! Great post from Cyril Mottier with a very helthy perspective about splash screens in Android applications:

I have recently seen many Android applications starting with what I call a splash screen. A splash screen is an image that takes the entire screen space and usually shows branding information about the application (...) This screen is generally visible for a small amount of time while the application is starting or loading some resources in the background.

Once again, from my point of view, the splash screen paradigm is a port of the iOS equivalent.

Bottom line, we ended up getting rid of it. I'm really happy with that decision.

Chris Umson is the Director of Self-Driving Cars at Google[x] and in March, he gave a talk at TED about the company's self-driving cars. The second half of the presentation is fascinating; Umson shows more than a dozen different traffic scenarios and how the car sees and reacts to each one.

It will be interesting to see how roads, cars, and our behavior will change when self-driving cars hit the streets. Right now, street markings, signage, and automobiles are designed for how human drivers see the world. Computers see the road quite differently, and if Google's take on the self-driving car becomes popular, it would be wise to adopt different standards to help them navigate more smoothly. Maintaining painted lines might be more important, along with eliminating superfluous signage close to the roadway. Maybe human-driven cars would be required to display a special marking alerting self-driving cars to potential hazards.¹ Positioning of headlights and taillights might become more standard.

Human drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians will necessarily adapt to self-driving cars as well. Some will take advantage of the cars' politeness. But mostly I suspect that learning to interact with self-driving cars will require a different approach, just as people talk to computers differently than they do to other humans -- think of how you formulate a successful search query, speak to Siri, or, more to the point, manipulate a Wii remote so the sensor dingus on top of your TV can interpret what you're doing.

1. Although if the car is smart enough to parse the arm motions of a police officer directing traffic, it can probably pick out the relatively inconsistent movement of a human-driven car in a second or two.↩

This collection of prints produced by artists about the Sino-Japanese War and housed in The British Library is great, but this particular print is just beyond:

We are proud to announce the release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.16: “The Great Annihilating Truth”! 0.16 features two new deities and many, many additions to and improvements on the game.

Download DCSS 0.16 here, or play it online on one of many servers across the world! Update: OS X binaries are now available! will be available soon.

The release tournament begins today (13 March 2015), with all online 0.16 games counting towards your score. See the tournament website for more details, including how to set up or join a clan.

0.16′s highlights include:

• Spells: Five new spells have been added, including Singularity, a level 9 Translocations spell that sucks in and destroys enemies with an intense gravitational field.
• Monsters: A huge number of monsters have been reworked or added; in particular the Tomb of the Ancients now has a far more diverse population.
• Gods: Ru the Awakened offers strength through sacrifice; Gozag Ym Sagoz the Greedy provides power through wealth. Nemelex Xobeh’s decks have been reworked and strengthened considerably, and Elyvilon’s abilities have been completely reworked.
• Branches: The tides in Shoals now shift only between shallow water & land, preventing players from getting stranded; they also move much faster than before. Each ziggurat successfully ‘cleared’ (by exiting from the 27th floor) makes all subsequent ziggurats even harder.
• Items: Many new rare and valuable items are now available, including shadow & quicksilver dragon armour, potions of ambrosia (replacing potions of confusion), and the dual-linked artefact quickblades, “Gyre & Gimble”. All chunks of flesh of a given type now merge together into a single, meaty slurry, and rotting chunks are gone. Double and triple swords are back.

For a list of other major changes, see the changelog. Many thanks to all those who have contributed to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. We hope you enjoy playing 0.16!

In this persuasive video, Chris Stuckmann argues that today's action movies are mostly bad and provides six reasons why.

His fifth point, the camerawork, drives him a little crazy.

Shakycam. Fucking shakycam. At some point, someone somewhere told Hollywood that people like incoherent incompetent camera work, blinding the audience with multiple cuts and assaulting us with nothing but a barrage of sound effects that are supposed to subconsciously tell us that something is happening on screen.

See also how to do action comedy from Every Frame a Painting and Chaos Cinema from Mattias Stork. (via devour)