What makes the Mongoose bat effective

“That small-looking thing in the hands of someone as huge as Hayden deceived everyone”

Matthew Hayden allowed his Mongoose bat to run a riot against Delhi Daredevils at the Ferozshah Kotla. Whenever he hit the bat, it stayed hit. But haven’t we already seen Hayden doing exactly the same thing with a regular bat? So what is really the difference between a regular and a Mongoose bat? For starters the blade is remarkably shorter than the regular bat, in fact, 33% shorter to be precise. But it weighs exactly as much as the regular bat. The weight which is taken away from the top is redistributed in the remaining half. It bears a striking resemblance to the bat we use during fielding drills. That bat is a lot lighter than the regular bat which is perhaps one of the reasons for using it. Hitting hundreds of balls during fielding drills takes a toll on the arm and that’s why most people prefer using a smaller bat. Also, since you mostly have to hit a stationary ball, the lack of blade isn’t a concern. A competitive match doesn’t give you such luxuries.

My first look at the Mongoose bat made me believe that the bowlers would easily get through under the bat. Bowling yorkers would prove to be an easy way to get rid of the dangerous man. Perhaps, even the Delhi bowlers thought along similar lines and bowled yorkers. But Hayden had it all planned.

Obviously we didn’t take into account the length of the handle which is remarkably longer to make up for the shorter blade. Looks can be deceiving and that small-looking thing in the hands of someone as huge as Hayden deceived everyone.

Another thing that baffled me was how effective this bat would be on the slow and low subcontinent tracks. Yes, the bat has a bigger sweet spot but what about the balls hitting the bottom of the bat? But my doubts were put to rest when I spoke to the director of the company which produces these bats. According to him the Mongoose bat has three times more wood at the bottom than the conventional bat which allows the batsman to hit even the yorkers and the low full tosses with a lot of power. And it was visible on Friday.

The Mongoose bat not only gives you more control over the willow but also increases your bat speed. The bat speed comes in quite handy when you’re trying to play an aggressive shot.

But the clincher came when the director confirmed the bat is made for playing in Twenty20 cricket and not in the other formats. And the reason for this is the missing top half of the bat makes playing the short-pitched deliveries slightly difficult. It also doesn’t give you any back-up in case of uneven bounce. You either hit the ball or run the risk of getting hit on the body. Obviously then, Hayden is willing to punt in order to hit bigger and better.

Also this bat is not for the people who bank on using the pace of the ball. Hayden’s batting wagon wheel showed that no runs were scored behind point on the off side which suggests that if you have a Mongoose bat in your hands that’s not the area you should be targeting. But that’s a small price to pay for being able to hit the yorkers and low full tosses because not many people are going to provide width in this format.

2010 Open Source Design Plans

2010 is the year we dive into open source design. We’ve dipped our toes in this pool before (icon contest, graphic design component for Trac tickets, header refresh contest, etc.), but this year we’re going to cannonball and make a big splash. Here’s what you need to know if you want to get involved.

A list for all seasons. Developers have the wp-hackers mailing list to discuss core and plugin code. Sometimes UI/UX stuff comes up and gets discussed there, but there is a whole universe of discussion around navigation labels, gradients, button styling, layouts, alignment, etc. that would be clutter on wp-hackers. Designers need a list to call their own, and now we have one. You can sign up for the wp-ui list to discuss ways to improve the interface or user experience of WordPress, and to discuss progress on design-related projects for the open source project, like the design challenges we’re going to have.

Design Challenges. We learned a lot from the icon design and header refresh contests, and we want to do these kind of open design challenges on a regular basis to give UI/UX designers who want to contribute to the WordPress open source project more opportunities to do so. If we could do one per month, that would be ideal, keeping the challenges relatively bite-sized to allow potential contributors an easy way to get involved at first. As each challenge is posted, people can use the list to bounce ideas off each other and work toward optimal solutions. I’m hoping the design challenges will evolve to be less contest and more collaboration. We’ll announce the first one before the end of January, so if you’re interested, please sign up for the list! (Hint: one will likely be a touch up to the Right Now dashboard module, to improve the information design, and there will be a couple of screen layout challenges coming up as well.)

Distributed Usability Testing. We started to try this out last year, and several dozen usability professionals volunteered to help get the program going, but a combination of scheduling and infrastructure issues combined to stall the progress. Having the “UI/UX contributor team” infrastructure in place, starting with the mailing list, will make it much easier to get this project going again.

Chit-chat. The weekly developer chats in IRC at #wordpress-dev have been very productive. We’ve created an IRC room at #wordpress-ui on irc.freenode.net so that we can have the same kind of “water cooler” for UI/UX contributors as for core code contributors. In addition to being a place where you can drop in and discuss core UI/UX (note: this room will not be a place to discuss the design of blog themes, it’s to discuss the design of the WordPress application itself), we’ll set up a weekly chat. Choosing a day and time for the chats will probably be the first discussion on the mailing list.

A blog of our own. Once again, taking a page from the code contributor infrastructure, we’ll set up a blog for UI/UX updates, announcements, progress reports, etc. This will be on WordPress.org in the nearish future, and will be announced to the mailing list when it is live.

So, if you want to become a contributor to core WordPress by using your design skills, join the wp-ui mailing list and get ready for a fun year!

WordPress 3.0, Beta 1

This is an early beta. This means there are a few things we’re still finishing. We wanted to get people testing it this weekend, so we’re releasing it now rather than waiting another week until everything is finalized and polished. There’s a ton of stuff going on in 3.0, so this time we’re giving you a list of things to check out, so that we can make sure people are testing all the things that need it.

You Should Know:

• The custom menus system (Appearance > Menus) is not quite finished. In Beta 2, the layout will be different and a bunch of the functionality will be improved, but we didn’t want to hold things up for this one screen. You can play with making custom menus, and report bugs if you find them, but this is not how the final screen will look/work, so don’t get attached to it.
• The merge! Yes, WordPress and WordPress MU have merged. This does not mean that you can suddenly start adding a bunch of new blogs from within your regular WordPress Dashboard. If you’re interested in testing the Super Admin stuff associated with multiple sites, you’ll need some simple directions to get started.
• We’re still fiddling with a few small things in the UI, as we were focused on getting the more function-oriented code finished first. For example, we’re getting a new icon for the Super Admin section.

Things to test:

• Play with the new default theme, Twenty Ten, including the custom background and header options.
• Custom Post Type functionality has been beefed up. It’s really easy to add new types, so do that and see how it looks!
• WordPress MU users should test the multiple sites functionality to make sure nothing broke during the merge.

Already have a test install that you want to switch over to the beta? Try the beta tester plugin.

Testers, don’t forget to use the wp-testers mailing list to discuss bugs you encounter.

We hope you like it! And if you don’t, well, check back when beta 2 is ready.

Download the WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 now!