Christian Heilmann

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Archive for July, 2012

Alcance by CPQD – an accessible and simple interface for smartphones

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

Accessibility and mobile devices is still and issue that needs solving. Sure, there were solutions for phones around for quite a while that would for example allow a blind person to listen to their phone (a friend I know uses a Nokia N95 for that) and the iPhone is considered by many a really good solution for people with disabilities but the price of the iPhone makes it less accessible for a lot of people.

At Campus Party Recife I gave a talk about Mozilla and the Open web device and got introduced by Felipe Cunha of Telefonicá Brazil to a product called Alcance by CPQD. Here is a quick interview with Felipe about it:

Here are the main points:

  • CPQD built this prototype after doing user testing and research with blind users, the elderly and people with learning disabilities and low literacy
  • The software runs on mid-range Android phones and uses private access to boot directly into the interface circumventing the main Android OS interface
  • Users can swipe on the screen and a voice reads out what app they are currently touching. Double-clicking opens that app with more voice information. Subsequent screens then all are the same size icons (6 per screen)

Here are some screenshots of the device in action:


Alcance by CPQD - start screen
Alcance start screen – no app selected


Alcance by CPQD - selected app
Alcance selected app screen


Alcance by CPQD - another selected app
Alcance another selected app screen


Alcance by CPQD - secondary menu
Alcance secondary app screen

Of course this will not replace a full-on smart phone with all its possibilities but I like the idea and the simplicity of it a lot. Telefonicá is very interested in seeing where this can go and I am pretty sure this could be easily converted to Firefox OS and in HTML5.

What I like most about it is that it was built after doing research with the intended audience rather than yet another protoype that assumes a lot and lands in the “innovation” bin in the company a few weeks later.

It will be interesting to see what else happens with this product. Especially in a market like Brazil where low literacy is an issue this could be a good way to bring connectivity to those who can benefit from it.

Reaching the audience vs. puerile purity

Saturday, July 28th, 2012

With the release of the videos of Rey Bango and me talking about web standards I once again found a pavlovian reaction of developers and people of the internet to publishing. Here is what happened:

  • Microsoft funded a series of videos talking about sensible use of web standards and embracing cross-browser development
  • Microsoft took on the production, editing, hosting, conversion and publishing of these videos
  • Never once in these videos is a Microsoft product promoted as better than others or the right choice

Microsoft releases these videos on their channel 9 platform which shows videos as an HTML5 embed and Silverlight. Silverlight proved to be an interesting video platform, which has features that HTML5 can not support at the moment, and of course is endorsed by Microsoft as their own product.

So, predictably – and something that saddens me – people who had Silverlight installed got a Silverlight version of the movies and went “neener neener, how IRONIC that you do HTML5 videos and release them as Silverlight”. I myself don’t have it, so both the Microsoft page and the embed are just an HTML5 video for me. I also very much enjoyed seeing the download links next to the video embed – I used them as I am on a bad hotel connection and streaming is not fun here.

People who had an outdated Silverlight plugin saw an upgrade message instead of the video and immediately complained about the video being broken – although the message said clearly that they can switch to an HTML5 player instead. This messsage had nothing to do with the video – instead it complains about outdated software. It makes sense to me to not allowed outdated plugins to run.

So here are the things that annoy me about this:

  • People complaining about the purity of HTML5 being attacked are the ones who installed a plugin in the first place and failed to keep it up to date. You never needed Silverlight to watch these videos.
  • Instead of using the very obvious fallbacks, or even reading the information the not-running plugin gives you it is more important to point out a non-existent irony

Now I am – being the HTML5 advocate and open web tree hugger that I am – going to shock you even more: I really don’t care if the videos are published in Silverlight or not – as long as I get a version I can use without a plugin, too.

One of the comments of the site admins made the point very clear:

@spoonfood: Site dev here… thought I’d reply to explain a few things. So, first off… Rey/Chris have nothing to do with how we choose to implement our video player, but having said that I don’t think we are doing anything wrong here. We have access to an adaptive streaming version of these videos, which is a technology that is not yet standardized across HTML 5 implementations, so by giving Silverlight to those that have it installed we don’t force anyone to install anything, but if they already have it they get a better experience in the Silverlight plug-in. If the experience was equal we would likely start with HTML 5 and fallback on non HTML 5 browsers.

I have encountered the same in the past: when embedding videos in my blog as HTML5 videos using vid.ly for conversion I felt like doing exactly the right thing. And I did. I saw it as someone living in the Western world with good connections though who might have trouble streaming but is very much OK to download a movie.

I got quite a lot of feedback from countries with flaky and slow connections who’d much more prefer that I post my videos on YouTube as they also have adaptive streaming that allows people to watch things in internet cafes in lesser quality but at least available to them.

So the learning here for me and all of us should be: getting the message out is the most important part.

I knew for a fact that on Channel 9 a lot of the audience will be Microsoft developers who have Silverlight and will use that. I am fine with that – these are the people I wanted to reach and why I agreed to this cooperation.

Getting our content out to people is the most important part in this. In the past, companies like Microsoft would have released this as a DVD or as a download in proprietary formats instead of making it available for free to the world. Instead of celebrating this change and enjoying that the content and the good messages about the open web get out to an audience struggling with embracing them we go for the childish and quick success of pointing out that someone is seemingly wrong on the internet.

This is exactly the same behaviour that keeps accessibility a subject that experts care about or people pay lip service to rather than understanding it. Years in that community made me give up on it to a large degree as incredibly good presentations and talks with information for developers never got released outside of the conference. The reasons were that transcribing and captioning the videos or even converting the slides to “accessible” formats was too much work or too expensive for the speakers and organisers.

Instead of getting important information out to a targetted audience of developers who are not differently abled great content remained mothballed to avoid a backlash of a puristic audience poised on calling out the lack of extra effort needed to bring the information to those who already knew it.

Information not getting out is a sad thing. You want to be heard, so think of who you consider the most important group to hear your message and make it available to them in the most convenient format. Don’t fall for the fake success of creating content in the most pure format but failing to reach those who need to hear what you have to say.

Videos of “modern web development” series with Microsoft now live

Friday, July 27th, 2012

About a month ago you might remember that I released the slides and code examples for a video training I recorded with Rey Bango of Microsoft.

It took a bit longer than we wanted to (the pink flamingo rendering algorhithm for the intro sequence is probably to blame) but now these videos are available on Microsoft’s Channel9 as the FoxIE training series.

Rey and me are covering quite a lot of topics in a very “free discussion” format:

If you want to present my talks yourself, the slides in various formats and the code examples with lots of explanations on how to present them are on GitHub.

All the videos are available in HTML5 format and to download as MP4 and WMV for offline viewing.

Developer evangelism tasks: pre-emptive writing

Saturday, July 21st, 2012

Looking around I am amazed how big the whole “developer evangelism” thing has become since we started it and I wrote the developer evangelism handbook (now updated with a new section on pre-emptive writing). I am also humbled by how many people cite it and mention it to me as a source of inspiration.

I find, however, that there is still a lot of confusion as to what developer evangelists do, and I also find lately that a lot of very obvious marketing and PR messages get sold as developer evangelism.

What we do as developer evangelists

Developer evangelism for me started out of the necessity to have an unbiased, sane voice for developers out there. We don’t sell products, we explain them and let developers make their own decisions about using them. Our main goal is word of mouth and people using the materials we provide. This means first and foremost one thing: being honest and real about what a product does and how it is useful for developers.

We also need to be the spokespeople for developers in our companies. We should know what people use out there and what they want, what excites them and how our products match those needs.

And this is where a skill comes in that can rub people with traditional marketing and PR tasks and skills the wrong way which I call pre-emptive writing.

What is pre-emptive writing?

What I mean by pre-emptive writing is that when you for example blog about a product you do not only praise its usefulness and show what it does for people but you also slip out of your role as a salesperson. Instead think of how you as a developer would read this were you a fan of a competing technology or other products.

Then you include and answer the arguments that you would write as comments to your own post playing that devil’s advocate. Instead of taking the traditional route of not mentioning flaws that might go undetected or obvious similarities to other products you mention them with the arguments that make them interesting for you. For example:

  • If your product has a flaw that needs ironing out you mention what can happen and how to recover or fix the issue. You also list the obvious feedback channels people can use should that problem happen to them. As developers we know that stuff breaks – it is ridiculous to claim otherwise and let people find out the hard way
  • If your product is very close to a competitor’s you explain that this is the case as the other product is a very useful thing and it wouldn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel if it runs smoothly. You point out the differences and benefits your product has – for example that it ties into a larger set of products or that it is available open source or performs better in a head-to-head comparison. People make these comparisons in any case – if you anticipate and do them in their stead they see that you are one of them and that you are not blinded by your own advertising. If the similarities are very obvious it would make you look like a very uninformed person or not very skilful liar not mentioning them

Why is this important?

Three words: de-trolling your feedback. Right now our jobs can be incredibly frustrating as the feedback we get (and marketing and PR also looks at) is largely polarised. You either have fans praising what you do over the moon or fans of your competitors pointing out that they already did the same and you are catching up.

Of course you also have comments full of vitriol by people who just hate what your company does and want to repeatedly tell you that, but that is a thing you can happily ignore.

By pointing out the obvious pros and cons of your product to people you prevent a lot of obvious hateful or overly excited comments. Yes, this will cut down on the number of comments you will get but it will also start a more interesting conversation.

Another effect of pre-emptive writing is that you don’t have to prepare a counter-statement – you already did that. In a traditional marketing world this is what you do. You don’t say what’s wrong but you prepare a statement for the press when things go wrong. In most cases you prepare this statement after things went wrong with a lot of stress, phone calls and “we need to deal with this now, people are re-tweeting and re-posting the bad messages all over the place”. This is stress we can avoid.

Getting pre-emptive writing out can be tricky as it is against a lot of basic beliefs of sales and marketing. But you are a developer evangelist – this is your job. Pre-emptive writing and constantly questioning your own products makes you one of your audience and keeps you their spokesman – a developer evangelist.

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Doodle jump and work

Thursday, July 19th, 2012

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.