Prof. Dipl.-Des. Oliver Wrede

Author: Oliver Wrede

  • 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…

  • The Longhorn crisis

    Well, I am personally tired of debating why to choose Macs over PCs. In every respect there are just two types of computer users: those who once lost their data and those who will loose their data. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Mac or a PC where your data was on… But if you…

  • Podcasts from thePreparedMind.com

    Christopher Gee is running a weblog subtitled »a blog about the graphic design industry«. He is doing interviews with people from the design profession about various topics. It is very helpful that Christopher listed some issues raised within each interview. So you get an overview before listening to the audio. I quote from an interview…

  • ArsElectronica presentation as audio

    ArsElectronica 2005 (1st-6th September) titled »Hybrid — living in paradox« has published most presentations as audio. There is a link »Webcasts« in the navigation, but it doesn’t contain any content yet. ArsElectronica has now a history since 1979. I’ve been to it in 1995 and it was quite an inspiring festival. I really think it…

  • Innovation in Organizations

    Interview with Dr. Bettina von Stamm: »If you view design as outcome you are likely to have a different perspective on design than if you view design as a process and set of skills. With the former the contribution of design and designers is almost exclusively limited to tangible products. If you take the latter…

  • Density, Simplicity and Continuity

    I am currently working on defining three seminars that lay out a foundation for design education. These courses are not oriented towards the formal and technological aspects of media, but rather focus on the psychological and cognitive questions involved with almost any design work. This is what I came up with: Density: Designing for effectiveness…

  • Privacy at stake…?

    Bruce Schneier in Wired discusses the challenge that surveillance technology raise for constitutional rights: Sometime in the near future, a young man is walking around the Washington Monument for 30 minutes. Cameras capture his face, which yields an identity. That identity is queried in a series of commercial databases, producing his travel records, his magazine…

  • Ecolanguage.net

    Ecolanguage.net uses visual animations to explain economical and ecological processes. The animations are planned for a common visual code to represent all issues involved with economy and ecology. They have just three types of transaction: yellow represent energy, red represents money and black represents information. It comes pretty close to what I intended with the…

  • Study.log

    I had a brief look at study.log. It is a personal information manager (developed with Macromedia Director). It is generally a very interesting concept. But the implementation has issues: there are show stopper bugs, it is very slow you can’t drag & drop objects from the OS layer into the application. Director possibly is not…

  • TiddlyWiki?

    I came across the TiddlyWiki tool. It is some kind of interactive Wiki opening pages with animation once you clicked a link. It is basically just a very clever JavaScript enhanced HTML-page containing the whole Wiki. You save the page (after allowing the script to do so), upload it to a server and you’re done.…

  • Enabled comments via Haloscan

    Marco Kalz complained about a missing comment feature. So, Marco, especially for you: Comments! I did not want to implement a comment feature myself, so I use the free Haloscan service to add comments and trackbacks. The drawback of this is, that comments may get lost once I want to quit the service.

  • Podcasting symposium

    There is a podcasting conference at ISIS institute at Duke University (in North Carolina) next week. I also found this podcasting directory for educators and some information about podcasting in education from Apple UK. Speaking of podcasting: If there would be a video feed containing clips like this I’d instantly subscribe to it! My bookmarks…

  • It doesn’t get worse than this

    Michael Ruppert doesn’t hesitate to comment on Rita – the second category 5 Hurricane that is making landfall this year. It will possibly be desasterous to US economy: The remaining half of Gulf energy production undamaged by Katrina is directly in Rita’s crosshairs. He is quoting several articles. For instance this quote by John Kilduff,…

  • Workshop on Blogging

    I am in Hamburg at the Campus Innovation conference to offer a small 90-minute workshop on blogging together with Nico Lumma. There are many attendees from the E-Learning community and universities here. I hope I can spur some ideas… Notiz an die Teilnehmer:Die Folien des Vortrags finden Sie hier [PDF; 3,6 MB]

  • Return from Hamburg

    I am in the train back to Cologne. I am thinking about, what I was seeing and hearing the last two days at the Campus Innovation conference. The conference theme was trying to bring educatiors and administration closer together in context of e-Education. Talking about the different sessions would make this a very long post.…

  • Webdesign changed

    I have been doing HTML pages since 1994 when xMosaic 1.0 hit the FTP servers worldwide. The only really radical changes to webdesign for a very very long time had been a) JavaScript, b) tables and c) frames. I hesitate to include CSS, because it was kind of buggy and browser specific for a long…