My girlfriend’s mom bought her one of those inexpensive ‘wireless’ notebook mouses. It is not even bluetooth enabled, it requires a USB adapter. I used it over the weekend and found it much better then my hip Apple mouse. Although I can’t squeeze it ( www.apple.com/mightymouse/ ) it is much easier to use. The tilt wheel concept is more precise then the little ball on the apple and the optical sensor works across any surface....
Sun released version 1 of javaFX today - http://www.javafx.com/ Its a competitor to Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, but based on the java developer created demos it just does not look complelling enough to matter. Adobe had been making some great progress in the Flash virtual machine and the number of advances in Flash10 really impress the coder in me. As a development manager I’m seeing Actionscript programmers reach an impressive level of maturity, with unit testing, automated builds and solid object design....
I found an interesting article today. A House With No Front Door It is written by a product marketing professional lamenting about dealing with ‘resource constrained’ engineering teams. Seeing as how I come from a resource constrained engineering team I thought it was an interesting read. The premise of the article was the disconnect as described: Perhaps it is my job to get this perspective across to them, and I try to do that, but the gulf between the “feature triage” perspective that many engineers have, and the “holistic” customer or market perspective that is needed is enormous....
I was watching Kitchen Nightmares where Chef Gordon Ramsay verbally attacks restaurant owners in order to point out the areas where they lack. I used to think he was just another character on TV but there was a turning point in that episode. The owner was berating everyone around him and causing so much stress that his customers noticed and his business was failing. People from the Chef to the Hostess noticed the problems but they didn’t try to fix the core issue....
Arpit led another session about how and when to use Flash in an Ajax world. One of the attendees was a Microsoft Silverlight manager and was a solid hour of dispelling myths about RIA in general. There is still a large population that thinks Flash/Silverlight are bad for SEO and not enough people know of Adobe’s recent collaborations with Google and Microsoft, including project Ichabod that makes Flash more indexable than Ajax (some details here: http://www....