This weekend, I had a spare couple of hours on Saturday night (as often happens when you have a kid) so I decided to pass the time with a bit of copy-paste coding.

I grabbed a bit of example code for a top-down racing game built using Box2d and GameJs. I then grabbed a Google Maps demo and a Nokia Maps demo and smooshed them together. I've seen a few racing games before so I know there's nothing innovative here, it's just a bit of silliness.

The results

• Driving on Nokia Maps
• Driving on Google Maps

Copy-Paste: Not a bad thing

There are many developers who will tell you that blindly copy-pasting is a terrible way to code. They make the valid points that you don't understand something if you don't read it properly and that you'll end up stuck down an algorithmic cul-de-sac with no way to three-point-turn your way out (although they may phrase it differently). These are valid points but...

If I'd sat down on Saturday night and thought "I want to build something in Box2D" then gone to the site, downloaded the library, read the docs and loaded the examples, by the time I had understood what I was doing, Sunday morning would have come round and I'd still have GameJS to read up on. There's absolutely no harm in blindly catapulting yourself a long way down the development track then looking round to see where you are. Sure, you'll end up somewhere unfamiliar and you may end up with absolutely no clue what the code around you does but at least you have something to look at while you figure it out. At least a few times, you'll find something almost works and a quick search of the docs later, you've figured it out and know what it's doing.

Basically, copy-pasting together a simple little demo and making it work is a lot more interesting than taking baby-steps through example code and beginner tutorials. Don't be too careful about trying to build something complicated.

How to actually work

Don’t tell anyone (particularly not your clients and especially not my clients) but making websites is really very easy. Don't make it harder by deliberately hindering yourself. You should always try to travel the shortest distance between “amends needs done” and “amend is done”. Again, I hear a “Pah!” in the distance, “Well, that’s obvious.”, but is it? Are you sure you’re ‘Being all you can be’?

The shortest distance

Okay, picture the scene: you've run out of socks. You need to put on a load of washing. The washing is in a pile in the corner of the room. You hunch over, pick up all the socks, pants, t-shirts and walk, waddle and totter to the washing machine. As you walk, you drop a sock and bend down to pick it up, dropping another. You recover that one and another falls. Eventually, you make it to the washing machine after a few minutes, put everything in, throw in some powder and set it going. As you head back to your bedroom, you spot three more socks that you missed. Darn.

Okay, picture the scene: you've run out of socks. You need to put on a load of washing. Fortunately, every time you took your socks off, you put them straight in the washing machine. You wander to the kitchen, put in the powder and switch it on. Done.

Any time you try to do anything, the more steps involved between intention and completion, the more likely it is to go wrong. Whether the intention is 'wear clean socks' or 'update this website', if you can do it in a handful of steps, you'll make fewer mistakes than if you have to do it in a hunched-over armful.

Workflow. The flow. Of Work.

The next time you're making an amend somewhere, watch yourself. Watch which applications you jump between. Don't just make your changes, pay attention to how you do them. Are you jumping between text editor and FTP client? Text editor and web browser? FTP and Subversion? Just take a few minutes to think about which steps you might be able to miss out. For instance, if you use Textmate and Transmit, you can set up DockSend so that pressing ctrl-shift-f then 2 will upload the file you currently have open to the same place on the server. You can now change the editor↔FTP↔browser cycle to editor↔browser.

However...

Seamless does not imply flawless. Don't be tempted to simplify to the stage where you don't need any interaction between making a change and the change being live. If you rely on the fact that your changes 'just happen', you might be tempted not to check. That's the point at which they don't 'just happen'.

Another game concept prototype – Sine

Honestly, I have no idea what I was going for with this one. It started off last weekend with a vague idea about matching patterns of numbers and old-school graphics and I don't know what and ended up with this.

The idea is to make the bottom row match the top row, basically. There are several front-ends to this game so you can choose the style of play you prefer - numbers and letters, waves, colours or a generated sound wave (if you have a shiny new-fangled browser). It uses the nifty little Riffwave library to generate PCM data and push it into an audio element.

Further development

If I were to develop this further, I'd try and build it in a modular fashion so that front-ends could be generated really easily and open it to other people to see how many different ways this game could be played. It'd be an interesting social experiment to be able to play what is fundamentally the same game in a dozen different ways. You could find out if visual thinkers processed the information faster than numerical or audio-focused people. Leaderboards could allow different styles of player to compete on the same playing field but with a different ball (hmm, weak sports analogy). The rhythms of the game lend themselves well to generated drum tracks so there's probably something in that area for exploring as well.

At the moment, the code is written as the programming equivalent of stream-of-consciousness – global variables everywhere, some camel-case, some underscored, vague comments sprinkled around. There's some commented-out code for the wave mode that moves the waves closer together so that there's a time-limit set but I felt it didn't suit the game.

I never really marketed it much but I wrote a book called ‘Explanating’ a couple of years ago. I even decided to self-publish¹ and organised ISBNs and everything.

The book is an "illustrated collection of completely plausible but entirely untrue explanations of everyday phenomena". Basically, it's lots of the kinds of things you might make up to explain something to a kid if you really have no idea. Hence the name ‘Explanating’ – it's kinda like explaining but not quite right. It also has a rather nice cheesecake recipe in the appendix. I put it on Lulu and Amazon and didn't really do anything else with it. I did try to get it in the iBookstore but that seems to be a horribly complicated process if you aren't based in the US.

Now available for the low, low price of...

Rather than have the book sit around for another few years not doing anything useful, I've decided to try something new. You can now download the book for free from explanating.com in your ebook format of choice (PDF, ePub, Mobi). You don't have to pay anything.

Unless you want to.

If you read it and decide you like it, you can come back to the site any time and buy it from Lulu or Amazon for £1.71 (or the equivalent in USD or EUR or wherever you happen to be). Or not, you could like it and keep it and not pay anything. It's entirely up to you. And your conscience :D.

Download, read, buy

I have no idea if anyone will actually take me up on this offer but I hope some people do, at least, enjoy the book. If nothing else, make the cheesecake, it's delicious.

And that URL once more

explanating.com