About cars and software

Have you ever noticed how cars seem to be getting less hardware and more software?

I have a confession to make. Cars mean little to me, but I do like gadgets. So when I bought my car years ago, I decided to maximize on the number of electronic gadgets in it. So I ended up with a car that:

• automatically darkens the rear view mirror when lights behind get too bright,
• automatically adjusts the windscreen wiper speed depending on the rain,
• automatically turns on the warning lights when breaking too hard and too fast on the highway and
• automatically lowers the side mirror when the gear is in reverse so you can see the sidewalk.

And much more. Great isn't it? Okay, so it doesn't have whisper mode or super pursuit mode, but still!

if (automaticNightColors && lights.isOn()) {
  navigation.setColor(NAV_COLOR_NIGHT);
}

if (starterkey.isOn()) {
  lights.setOn(true);
}

Even though both teams did an outstanding job, the result is a bit funny for me as end user. I have to manually switch to night colors in my car because the "Automatic" setting always renders the screen nice and dark. Regardless of the time of day, amount of light or any other circumstance that might make me want to go all night goggly.

The other day I noticed something similar in the WCB design guidelines. The document has been written to help us get the best out of our WCB's. One of the guidelines says to put a "readme.txt" and "changelog.txt" in your WCB and example files are provided. On the other end of the spectrum are the Maven archetypes to help us get started on a WCB in the best possible way. Two very helpful incentives to get good WCB's.

There's one missing link though... How to get your .txt files into the WCB?

It took some attempts and some asking around, but finally I found out that you have to place them as:

<WCB top directory>/src/main/resources/readme.txt
<WCB top directory>/src/main/resources/changelog.txt

But the goodness does not stop there!

Other than for my car's navigation system, I can assist in getting rid of this particular oversight.

Just hop over to the Issue Tracker and help us improve GX WebManager, like I did. Isn't life great?

Greetings,

Patrick