Author: Oliver Wrede
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Knowledge tools
I think it is pretty remarkable how many applications have appeared that could help people to capture creative thinking. Here is a selection (I restrict it mostly to OS X applications): Graphing Inspiration: a powerful mind mapping and concept mapping application OmniGraffle: a graphing application (similar to Visio) Novamind: a classic mind mapping application ConceptDRAW…
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Nuclear power the only green solution?
This article by James Lovelock keeps me thinking. 25 years ago he was one of the first to warn about the global warming and he first conceived the Gaia hypothesis while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in the mid-1960s, where he was designing life detection instruments for NASA’s Mars Viking probes.…
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Counter-Productive Multitasking
Another article about how much counter-productive is multitasking. Because we’re people, we don’t swap out the content of our brains as easily as a computer does, and we definitely don’t swap in the old state when we’re ready to return to the original task. […] Gerald Weinberg, in Quality Software Management, Vol. 1, Systems Thinking…
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Digital Technologies for Deliberative Democracy
A project at Columbia’s Center on Organizational Innovation is looking at how technology has or hasn’t been used to enable participatory democracy in the rebuilding of the WTC: “New digital technologies have figured critically in the process of deciding the future of Lower Manhattan after September 11th, not only supplying the infrastructure for soliciting public…
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Asian movies
I heard on the news that asian movies were great in Cannes this year. But I am sure this title was not among the nominees.
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Leaks in Los Alamaos
Somehow I find this article very disturbing: Los Alamos National Laboratory has confirmed that classified computer media can not be located. Could it be that the Los Alamos laboratory is a self-service outlet for spies and terrorist affiliates?
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Findability.org
Peter Morville on findability.org: Ambient findability describes a world in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. And Al Abut posts a comment on that site: You know what would help me with the findability of your site updates? An RSS/Atom feed!
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TYPO3 QuickStart 3.6.1 for Mac OS X
MacOS X installer for TYPO3 3.6.1 ready for download! Get the updated package here. Andreas Beutel (who provided the OS X package) also wrote an installation tutorial.
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HazardCards
HazardCards is a project spearheaded by the Learning Lab Denmark. What is it? A bunch of visual cards to learn and teach about technological hazards. You can play a game with the existing cards or create your own cards. A new twist to a old method of disseminating facts and stories. [via elearningpost]
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Software patents in Europe
This news story reports the EU finally will decide to allow software patents in Europe. But it appears the patents will be limited to software that is attached to specific hardware or can be used to produce new things. Seriously I think software patents will destroy more economic value than they can protect. Their primary…
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SubEthaEdit 2.0 released
SubEthaEdit is a group-enabled text editor for Mac OS X and it has been updated to version 2.0. Some of the new features: Regular Expression Find and Replace New collaboration feature: Invitations Read only access to documents Show invisible characters Autocompletion Splitview More powerful syntax modes Preferences per syntax mode 300% more efficient network protocol…
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Frontier Kernel will become open source
Dave Winer —former president of UserLand— convinced UserLand to release the Frontier kernel as open source. Manila, Radio and all web applications built upon that kernel will remain commercial software. I really hope this will turn out to be a smart move for UserLand. I am using Frontier since 1996 and I have learned a…
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Comments on
I finally managed to add a rudimentary comment feature. It needs a lot more tweaking.
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New Apple Tutorials
Apple has published some interactive tutorials for beginners: Mac OS X Basics, Printing in Mac OS X, Moving to Mac OS X, Fonts in Mac OS X. I can’t tell whether or not the topics are actually requiring such tutorials and they are didactically well done, but judging from the first look these tutorials seem…
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George Olsen offers a toolkit for creating personas
GUUUI.com points me to a helpful document (PDF): George Olsen has developed a persona toolkit, which can help you build detailed profiles of users, their relations to a product (e.g. a website), and the context in which they use a product. The toolkit is pretty extensive, but intended to be based on a pick-and-choose approach.George…
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Impact of design on stock market performance
GUUUI.com has news on the economic value of design that has been published by the Design Council UK: Evidence for the link between shareholder return and investment in design has been scarce and anecdotal. An analysis of the British stock market has shown that companies that invest effectively in design, have outperformed the rest of…
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The end of filesystems
What users will see in the next few years is a replacement of the filesystem storage paradigm with a database storage paradigm. Microsoft is working on it and Apple seems to develop something similar as well. Oracle already stretched their database to accommodate some kind of filesystem like access – which is not aimed at…
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Blogs at universities
Stephan Mosel pointed to a new weblog initiative at the University of Minnesota. This project offers a free weblog to every university member. This now makes three places in US that offer central weblog services to every member: Harvard University: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ Stanford University: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/itss/projects/blog/ Univeristy of Minnesota: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/ Peter Baumgartner asks why german universities do…
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Information Visualization Companies
Marian Steinbach has collected companies specialized on information visualization: This is a list of some ~30 companies which have a focus on products or services that deal with information visualization. From A like Aaron Marcus + Associates to X like XPLANE.
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On Outliners
Here is a teriffic series of articles about outliner software: NoteTaker and NoteBook—May 2004 Announcing the FORE/1 Outliner—Apr 2004 Legacy Outliners—Mar 2004 Outliner User Interfaces—Feb 2004 Outliner Use Patterns—Dec 2003 Outliner Features—Part 2—Nov 2003 Outliner Features—Part 1—Oct 2003 Outliner History—Sep 2003