All posts tagged: halfbaked

Harry Potter and the half-baked debate

Harry Potter and the half-baked debate

Everyone and everything you love will eventually fall short of your expectations. That’s just how life works. Nobody’s perfect, and the longer a piece of art abides, the more likely it is that it’ll start to suck. Few constituencies understand this better than comedy and fantasy fandoms, like-minded crowds that tend to share an affinity for the written word. Some of my favorite comics are also experts on elves and superheroes. I don’t know where “Have I Got News for You” star Michael Ian Black falls on the nerd scale, though the comedian hosts a literature podcast called “Obscure.” Its current season dissects “An American Tragedy,” which I haven’t read. I’d bet I’m not alone there, and I’d further guess that far more people are familiar with J.K. Rowling than “Tragedy” author Theodore Dreiser. All that is to say, when Black moseyed into a Bluesky hornet’s nest about the upcoming HBO “Harry Potter” series, I honestly think he underestimated how much he’d get stung. What’s important is that Black is voicing a view silently held …

3 apps that feel finished on iPhone, but half-baked on Android (and why)

3 apps that feel finished on iPhone, but half-baked on Android (and why)

It used to be a tale as old as time: iPhone apps would get the best features before Android. As Android has quickly become the most-used operating system in the world, developers have taken notice and often bring features to Android in parity with iOS, and sometimes even first. However, there are still a handful of apps that have a significant number of extra features or better user interfaces on the iPhone versus Android, which most likely relates to the relative ease and power of the iOS development environment which runs on a finite number of phones, versus Android, which still has a bit of a fragmentation issue. Here are a few such apps that have evolved on iOS to the point of making the Android versions feel half-baked. Hero Assistant on iPhone Credit: Brandon Miniman / MakeUseOf The Hero Assistant app promised us the world, and while it was a bit of a letdown, one thing is for sure: the iPhone version is more feature-complete. This app was supposed to be a super-app that integrates …