Monthly Archives: October 2005

First impressions on Ajax frameworks…

I had a (very) brief look into some Ajax/DHTML JavaScript frameworks flying around. There are so many and to really compare them in detail would require time that I don’t have right now. So I can only come up with some first impressions: Backbase appears to be a commercial but extremely clean and well designed [...]
Posted in Programming | Leave a comment

Stanford on iTunes

This is really great: While others are still resisting the idea to webcast course content online Stanford moves along by integrating (at least some of) their educational content with the iTunes Music Store. Can you see the iTunes Educational Shop coming up? One-click shopping for lectures and files that use the same DRM protection like [...]
Posted in Disruptive | Leave a comment

Rosa Parks

There are certain topics I never covered much in this weblog. Human Rights is one of them. Today news tells us that Rosa Parks died and she will probably remain in history forever reminding us that one moment of courage can change so much.
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The rise and fall of frameworks

I think the next 6-12 month we will see an incredible buzz about web application frameworks – some on the server side and some on the side of the client: OpenLazlo is competing with Macromedia Flex. for the so called “Rich” Internet Application market. I am somewhat sceptical about thie RIA-approaches. If you can establish [...]
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News (in desperate times?)

Mark Bernstein about the ignorance of US mainstream media to world events: The CNN front page headlines include, among the top 6 stories:“Jennifer Aniston photographed kissing Vince Vaughn”I don’t follow the news much. Is there some reason Jennifer Aniston shouldn’t be kissing Mr. Vaughn? This simply made my day
Posted in Contemplation | Leave a comment

Getting Things Done tools

The book »Getting Things Done« by David Allen is a bestseller. It offers a strategy of how to prioritize things you have to do. It is a combination of a tracking device (like a box of notes) and a routine of how to use that device. I am running my own Tinderbox tool to keep [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Design Sites

I just want to raise the attention to these invaluable sites (some of which have been in my Blogroll for years): A list apart Boxes and Arrows Column Two Corporate Identity Portal (german) Digital-Web Functioning form Future Feeder Guuui.com IDblog IAslash.org/blog IAwiki Information aesthetics Informationdesign.org Jeffrey Veen OK/Cancel Signal vs. Noise xBlog I recommend theses [...]
Posted in Design | Leave a comment

Need more time for work? Sleep less!

Interestingly there is a whole armada of things keeping us under pressure: you got to be more productive, faster, better organized, and so on. The computer has not only enhanced our productivity: ubiquitous computing also means there will be no excuse to be unproductive (except when you »deserved« a break)? There are already many people [...]
Posted in Contemplation | Leave a comment

Continuity

Today I started the Continuity seminar weblog (RSS). There is also a special tag-pair on del.icio.us (RSS) for that seminar as well (unfortunatly the URLs will change soon). The topic of that seminar is still evolving, but the task is to understand the psychological and cognitive aspects of flow and its relation to design (mainly [...]
Posted in Cognition | Leave a comment

How weird the job of an character animator can be

So, you’d think that the job of an computer graphics animator would involve nothing but sitting in front of a screen and clicking little icons and buttons all day long? Well, looking at these folks I think the curricula may need some tweaking for the required skill sets…
Posted in Contemplation | Leave a comment

3rd International Design Research Conference in Brazil

Next week there’ll be another conference on Design Research in Rio De Janeiro. Unfortunatly the conference website is extremely lousy. I can’t even remember a conference website with so superficial and useless information. Obviously the organizers don’t want to get too international. First of all I was suprised to read “3rd international conference” in the [...]
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Flock screenshots

I am eager to test Flock. Someone posted some screenshots on Flickr.com. As far as I know it is based on Firefox and it is going to work with del.icio.us for Bookmarks and flickr.com for images. It will also a sepcial interface for bloggers where creating blog posts is a matter of drag & drop [...]
Posted in Tools | Leave a comment

The Patchwork Portal

Ton Zijlstra suggests a portal concept for work groups to cllaborate and exchange. His idea utilizes two weblgs, a wiki with an internal area and a discussion board. Ton patches together several tools for this (a Wikka Wiki, two WordPress blogs and a Simple Machines forum). That’s a way to go with almost no server [...]
Posted in Methodology | Leave a comment

AJAX-based editing online

I had a chance to briefly check out these collaborative editors based on AJAX: writely.com, backpackit.com & writeboard.com, jotspotlive.com. It is pretty amazing what developers are trying to achieve now. Backpackit is aimed to be some kind of simple groupware. Writely.com and Jotspot Live are aimed at collaborative writing. I personally found the visual feedback [...]
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