I like playing Doodle jump on my phone. It is a very simple, fast game and I like the graphics not trying to be impressive but just a little funny time waster. I also like that it has no music.

I also found though that it is a very good metaphor for working. Why? Well, here are some of my musings:

The simple way that quickly gets forgotten

The task of Doodle jump is to get from one platform to the next without falling. You could play almost endlessly if you just think about reaching the next platform near to you. At work, that would be doing the next task and doing that one right.

As a kid I loved Momo by Michael Ende. It is a book featuring a street cleaner who explains this way of working to Momo:

“...it’s like this. Sometimes, when you’ve a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly long it is and feel sure you’ll never get it swept. And then you start to hurry. You work faster and faster and every time you look up there seems to be just as much left to sweep as before, and you try even harder, and you panic, and in the end you’re out of breath and have to stop—and still the street stretches away in front of you. That’s not the way to do it.

You must never think of the whole street at once, understand? You must only concentrate on the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom, and the next, and the next. Nothing else.

That way you enjoy your work, which is important, because then you make a good job of it. And that’s how it ought to be.

And all at once, before you know it, you find you’ve swept the whole street clean, bit by bit. what’s more, you aren’t out of breath. That’s important, too… (28-29)”

― Michael Ende, Momo

Sure you won’t be a superhero working that way, but you deliver a job and you don’t wear yourself out.

Don’t expect stability when it is not needed

There are not many situations in the game when this changes. Yes, some platforms vanish or crack once you step on them, but so what? You normally don’t jump twice on the same plaform anyways. The only difference is that you need to be a bit faster (especially with the yellow to red fading ones). Don’t let the fact that you can’t trust that platform stress you out. All you need is to get on it once and move on.

If you have a dependency at work make sure you get from it what you need and don’t expect that to happen every single time – it won’t. Have a plan B to move ahead on instead of getting stuck trying to deliver Plan A because of something you can not control.

Reasons you die in Doodle jump

Technically the game should be never ending. There is not much that can go wrong. You jump from platform to platform, you avoid obstacles and enemies and if you can’t avoid them you can still shoot them or there are even shields you can grab to be invincible for a short while.

Actually I found most of the reasons you die to be self-made:

• Haste – instead of jumping from platform to platform it is very tempting to reach for the springs, the propeller hat, the trampolines and the jetpack to move ahead quicker. The game makers know this of course and tempt you constantly. Many a time you try doing that instead of reaching the simpler next platform. Especially in the case of a single spring this is not worthwhile as it propels you the same distance as three simpler steps would. At work, we call these things shortcuts – moving ahead too quickly to reach a goal fooling ourselves into believing we will get time to fix things later on. We won’t.
• Aggression – many a time I die in Doodle Jump it is because I try to shoot an alien (especially the one with the flapping wings as it makes me twitchy) instead of avoiding them. At work this could be trying to be as good as somebody else by all means necessary or trying to get their job. You might succeed at that but you won’t be happy doing it. Beating yourself by being better tomorrow than you are today is a way to beat competition and learn at the same time. In Doodle jump most aliens can be avoided by using platforms around them instead of shooting them – this even means you can play with one hand
• Focusing on the score – every single time my eyes go up to check the score and if I am on track to beat my last one I die in Doodle jump. Which is ironic if you think about it. At work this could be goals that the company sets for itself, your team or you for yourself. If your drive becomes to reach goals rather than doing the right things to reach them then you will fail. You will reach some of them, sure. But you will not have an arsenal of techniques to reach the next ones as you failed to think about your steps whilst reaching the goal
• Being sucked into a black hole – Doodle jump features black holes that suck you in that you cannot shoot but you need to avoid. There are also UFOs that abduct you but you can shoot those. At work we call both of these meetings, town halls and all hands. The black hole ones can sometimes not be avoided but the UFO ones could be circumvented unless you allow yourself to be sucked into every single one of them
• Distraction – of course the biggest thing is getting distracted whilst playing. Doodle jump is fast and needs your attention. Work does, too. In many cases we think we can multi-task, but we can’t. So from time to time it is important to suspend what you do and pause it before doing something else and then coming back resuming the paused task instead of trying to deliver two at the same time

Maybe I am overthinking this, but from time to time I like having fun jumping from step to step rather than speeding along with a jetpack and failing to miss my landing.

Want to fix the mobile web? Are you developing mobile apps using web standards and libraries?

At Mozilla we are right now planning our outreach to libraries and tool makers to support more than one platform when it comes to mobile web development. To make sure that we change where it is most needed we need some more information.

Could you do me a favour and fill out a quick survey about libraries and developer use?

I killed my Macbook Air the other day and I am still not convinced about the current ones. The intel video chipset has/had problems with WebGL on Chrome and when I tried to connect to a projector, it did nothing whatsoever which is a deal breaker for me as a presenter. It seems the way to fix that issue is to reboot the machine with a power lead attached and connected to the projector. But this still sounds like a hack to me and I don’t buy macs to reboot them before a talk. So I am waiting for the rumoured MBP 13” upgrade which would be cool.

What this taught me though is things I told people for years – back up all your stuff online as you can get it there as a last resort. Of course this is more frustrating than anything when you are on the road and offline or on a very slow hotel connection, but it is better than being stuck as it means that if your hardware deserts you, you can still use some other machine.

For the moment I switched to the company 15” macbook pro for work but it is incredible how unwieldy and slow this one feels in comparison. It has a traditional hard disk, and coming back to that from SSD is just weird – especially for video and presentation work. For example I recorded a voiceover for slides using the Quicktime recording in Keynote and the audio and video was completely out of sync.

So I thought that this is a great opportunity to make a total switch and give full online working a go. I am writing this on the Chromebook I got at the last Google IO and which subsequently left a shy retired life on my shelf. Upgrading to the latest Chrome OS I found it to be actually quite useful. The machine is not as heavy as the 15” MBP to carry around and the keyboard is good. The trackpad is utterly woeful however, but I am 90% a keyboard user.

For editing I use WordPress, Google Docs, Wikis and Etherpad. For coding I am using Cloud 9 IDE which ties in with Github. Storage is Google Drive (although dropbox might be better, just not sure how to do that with a Chromebook. I miss Skitch and I am still not quite happy with Twitter’s page instead of Tweetdeck/Client. I also would love to use Spotify but alas there is no web version except for setting up my own play buttons.

Things I can not do of course is video editing, but I might give the YouTube editors a go.

All in all it is incredible just how much you can do online already and in a lot of cases our offline storage is more of a Linus blanket than really having things handy as we fill up our hard drives without tagging or naming files properly. I will see how far I can go with this and try out the new features the Google infrastructure promises us.

Being able to correctly estimate time is a very important skill for speakers and people who record themselves on screencasts and the like. The media loves you when you can deliver a sound-bite of a certain length. So I thought it would be a fun thing to build a very simple game to test your sense of time.

So go and play Time yourself (source on GitHub). All you need to do is to accept the challenge and you get a message telling you how many seconds you should press your mouse or a key and it will tell you how many milliseconds you were off. Of course it then also gives you a chance to boast about your skills on Twitter using the #timeyourself hash tag.

Under the hood this is a demo for an upcoming event article for Smashing magazine and it uses the timeStamp of click and key events to measure how long you pressed the key or the mouse.

Enjoy!

Summary: my laptop broke, I needed a new one, and I am thoroughly disappointed by the new Macbook Air and Apple’s helpfulness when things really need quick solutions. First-world problems, I know, but it might be interesting for some.

I am writing this on my Mozilla 15” Macbook Pro, a machine that so far I only used for heavy lifting tasks at home. I was a happy user of the hefty version of the Macbook Air when it came out:

Water and Air don’t mix

Now, on the flight over to Webvisions Barcelona, a glass of water succumbed to gravity and poured itself over the computer, leaving it as a slightly dripping black wedge to cut cheese with (anything else stopped working).

Meeting the genius (part one)

Right after landing, I went to the hotel, checked in and took a cab to the nearest Apple store to get the machine opened and hopefully saved.

After being told that the next appointment with a Genius is in 6 days time, I reminded the person of the urgency of the matter and that an expensive piece of hardware might be salvagable including my peace of mind and the keynote I have to give 2 days later.

We found a way to have a genius look at my machine, and look he did. He took it back to the lair of awesome where machines get to heal, opened it, took photos of the water damage, closed it and gave me the computer back – closed – showing me just how much water was in there. Foolishly I thought leaving the machine open and maybe next to a huge fan would be a good plan, but I am no genius (and I don’t want to sell hardware).

With the talk date looming I thought I bite and asked to buy a new Macbook Air. They didn’t have a 8 GB memory upgrade and only ones with Spanish keyboards, but hey – I can touch type and it would be cool to confuse people with it. So I forked over 1544 Euro and went back to the hotel to re-set my computer and install and download all the things I need.

Setup and first issue: WebGL and Chrome

The hotel wireless was free but also flaky so I ended up writing most of my talk in HTML in textedit and waited until the conference next day and a better connection to download all the things I needed.

The first thing I realised when I did the screencasts for my slides that WebGL and 3D transforms didn’t work on Chrome any longer. Seeing that a lot of the demos I wanted to show ironically ask you to use Chrome I had to hack my way in by spoofing the user agent string in Firefox which worked fine. Setting the “Override software rendering list” flag was proposed as a fix, but that lead to crashes of the Air – repeatedly.

This, I am sure, is a temporary issue until Apple get their act together and fix the drivers.

After setting up the machine for a day and grudgingly coming to terms with the non-upgraded RAM (I don’t care for harddisk size, I want 8GB of RAM) the morning came where I was supposed to give my talk.

Deal breaker: Macbook Air + long cable = no presentation

I set up on stage, opened the shiny new expensive laptop, connected my VGA cable and saw some blue bars – that’s it. The new Macbook Air does not connect to projectors via VGA with long cables. We verified that with mine, Matt May’s and some other speaker’s Macbook Air in two rooms, with different cables, different connectors, projectors and all the settings we can think of. It seems the great shiny new Thunderbolt connection is good for file transfer but underpowered for projection.

This was the final straw and after presenting from another computer I went back to the Apple store to return the computer. I bought an external harddrive to do a time machine backup not to lose all the stuff I set up and – receipt in hand – went to return the annoying machine.

After having to explain to 5 different geniuses that as a public speaker having a computer that does not project is a bit of a deal-breaker and that showing me that it does connect to a nearby monitor with a one foot cable is not a proof that it should work I got my money back.

Not sure what to pick – Apple might lose a customer

Now I am using my company machine for company work and I am pondering to give the chromebook a try for working in the cafe (using Cloud9IDE). Of course I will buy myself a new computer, but I have a hard time choosing what I want from Apple:

• The Air is out of the equation with these bugs (the latter being a hardware fix I don’t see them doing any time soon)
• The 13” MBP would be great for traveling, but it only goes up to 1280 resolution (how come the lesser specced Air goes up to 1440? – riddle me this)
• Retina looks sexy, but I don’t see the point of it as it gives me a false sense of what people I work for would see
• Seeing the Chrome issues I am not convinced at all about the Intel graphics chipset and I want NVIDIA
• I want to have a beefy machine that is very portable which was the Air but the latest update really broke a lot of things I need.

Maybe it is time to go back to Windows or be a man and use Ubuntu.