Prof. Dipl.-Des. Oliver Wrede

Author: Oliver Wrede

  • Frontier: There’s life in the old dog yet

    Frontier 9.0.1 beta 2 is released. Seems UserLand has started to work on Frontier and Manila again. That’s good news. I’d like to hear what they have in store for the Frontier application core.

  • Design hypothesis vs. Scientific hypothesis

    As a comment to the Rotman Management design issue (pdf) magazine Victor Lombardi quotes Jeanne Liedtka from page 12: The most fundamental difference between the two, they argue, is that design thinking deals primarily with what does not yet exist; while scientists deal with explaining what is. That scientists discover the laws that govern today’s…

  • An MFA is the new MBA?

    Beth Mazur on her IDblog: The May issue of Design Research News has a very interesting promo about the Harvard Business School (HBS) declaring the ‘Master of Fine Arts’ (MFA) as the new ‘Master of Business Administration’ (MBA)… essential for a business career. But they point to the online publication [PDF, 19 MByte] of the…

  • Creating and Consuming Web Services With PHP

    Creating and Consuming Web Services With PHP: Find out how to create XML-RPC, SOAP and REST web services using PHP, the most popular scripting language for web applications. [via Der Schockwellenreiter]

  • Outage tonight

    I apologize for an outage of this site. The Zope server crashed. Seems I need to run some kind of watchdog+restart script. Does anybody have a tip about this?

  • How inventions change communication

    On 1st July I’ll present some thoughts about “Once upon a time… an imaginary retrospective about the history of technology of the next 30 years” at the Museum for Communication in Frankfurt. I think the topic will be fun to talk about. I don’t really have any idea what kind of people will visit that…

  • BlogWalk 2.0 ahead

    I am going to participate in the BlogWalk 2.0 workshop in Nürnberg on 28th May. I think there are about 15-25 people invited. In contrast to the BlogWalk 1.0 event in March this time it appears to be focussed on weblogs in education. There is also a BlogWalk 3.0 event already scheduled for 4th July…

  • Visual Design Elements of Weblogs?

    Lois Ann Scheidt and Elijah Wright:Common Visual Design Elements of Weblogs [DOC] Conclusion: One pattern clearly emerging as a result of this research is that individual webloggers do not tend to make substantive structural changes to the layout of their sites. This confirms one of the predictions / observations leading to this study: that ‘significant’…

  • Content vs Context – a contradiction?

    Peter Baumgartner reminds us about the role of usage context for quality assessment of learning materials: In all the projects funded by the German BMBF we have tried to deliver excellent e-Learning content. As chairman of the “audit commission” I led a group of experts who recommended the ministry a change of gears: Instead to…

  • More critic on Nielsen

    Andrei Herasimchuk wrote an open letter to Jakob Nielsen in response to this Alertbox story: […] Mr. Nielsen, I respectfully request you stop posting articles like this. You do yourself and the usability field a disservice by speaking in terms that are vague, not backed up with research data, and filled with hyperbole. Further, until…

  • Using the 5Es to Understand Users

    Whitney Quesenbery has a very memorable explanation about usability: The 5Es are helpful in planning your usability testing, because each suggests specific techniques:

  • Spike

    Spike is a a cross-platform shared clipboard (OS X, Windows 2K+).

  • SOAP in Python

    Here is a good place to start learning about SOAP in Python (written by Mike Olson, Scott Archer and Uche Ogbuji). There are five Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 [via Daily Python-URL]

  • TinderDo sample file

    I have added a sample file for a ToDo list management with Tinderbox. It is basically implementing the description of “TinderDo” by Gordon Meyer. Unfortunatly he did not include a sample file to start directly. So I made one myself. You can add tasks (and nested tasks) in the ToDo container and after entering a…

  • When user interfaces fail

    Some people like to do “designer bashing” from time to time. I was just in the mood to do some “developer bashing” today. There are a number of reasons why user interfaces of many software packages fail. I assume (slightly unfair and inaccurate), that in many cases there is no interface designer involved with user…

  • Educational scenarios

    Will Richardson on Weblogs Creating a whole new Campus Culture: Article about the Weblogging program set up by a student at Reed College in Oregon where any student who wants one can have one. He’s got 147 going right now. An interesting read that gets to both sides of college level use of blogs and…

  • Tinderbox 2.2

    Eastgate released Tinderbox 2.2. Many PC users don’t know about Tinderbox. There is a Windows version coming soon.

  • I mix & you mix, we all mix for iMix

    Today Apple released iTunes 4.5 for Mac and Windows with a number of new features: All the artist/album names and song titles in my library have a shortcut into the music store now. And there is a party shuffle mode where you can control the flow of the songs played and see which song recently…

  • A closer look at why people blog

    Here is a paper (PDF) by Bonnie Nardi, Diane Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht and Luke Swartz about motivations for weblogging: We discovered five major motivations for blogging: documenting the author’s life, providing commentary and opinions, expressing deeply felt emotions, working out ideas through writing, and forming and maintaining communities or forums. These motivations are by no…

  • John Seely Brown website

    George Siemens: I’ve long been a fan of John Seely Brown. His views of how knowledge is shared, how people work, and how digital media are impacting society are visionary. Thanks to Maish for providing a link to JSB’s website. [via elearnspace]