Under My Palapa

Apple definitely has success at developing organic growth, and a lot of that has to do with Jonathan Ive, at least when looking from the outside. In this blog post, the following excerpt jumps out at me. It really captures what frustrates me about working on enterprise software in a corporate environment.

“We don’t do focus groups,” Ive said firmly when asked how Apple decided what products to build. He explained that focus groups resulted in bland products designed not to offend anyone. (To which Sir Christopher added Henry Ford’s famous line that if he’d asked his customers what they wanted, they would have demanded a faster horse.)

The approach of cramming every feature possible into a piece of software is something I’m quite familiar with. When will companies start realizing they should be focusing more on what features to throw out?

Whoever decided that Bank of America’s logo should appear atop a red background should be fired.

Unless they are preparing us for another version of the logo with white text, I don’t see why they went and did that. The new signs are ugly, and I honestly thought their sign installers made a mistake. Blue on top of red is just bad.

I saw some people were finding this blog by doing a search for ExtJs with JSF.

I previously searched and found that someone had wrapped up ExtJs into a JSF library, however it appeared to be a dead project.

A coworker and I instead decided to use Apache Shale to expose methods in a managed bean, to return the JSON data that ExtJs wanted. At the time, we were only using the ExtJs Tree component. We needed to use the ExtJs Tree instead of the one from RichFaces because of a certain requirement that could not be fulfilled with RichFaces.

I’ve arranged to be able to blog some of the things I am working on, at least the ‘generic’ parts that don’t give away any company secrets. Hopefully I will be able to make a small contribution back to the developer community with this blog. It will probably be a mix of JavaFX, Adobe Flex, and in my off hours, Cocoa and Objective-C.