Prof. Dipl.-Des. Oliver Wrede

Blog

  • 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 lot from it. It is an application with such a high integration (database, server, scripting interpreter and graphical development environment in one integrated application), that for some reasons it is really a joy to develop web applications with it.

    I am looking forward to see what this open source release will look like and if it is possible to integrate it with my own ideas again. There was a rich developer community alive back before Frontier went commercial that has more or less vanished from the stage. I wonder if that will come to life again.

  • Comments on

    I finally managed to add a rudimentary comment feature. It needs a lot more tweaking.

  • 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 to be crafted with skill.

  • 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 Olsen also gives advice on how to collect information. Ideally, personas should be based on interviewing and direct observation, but you can also get useful information from alternative sources, such as domain experts, research, and artefacts that reveal information about the users’ context.

  • 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 the stock marked by 200%.

    This analysis is available as PDF.

  • 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 turning a database into a filesystem but rather to offer a transition path.

    Replacing the filesystem with a database will allow content to be managed based on wider attribute sets and mostly independently from the file format. It will be possible to look up content on your drive similar to SQL queries. Finding files and/or content on hard disks will be much faster then today – and it may require a lot of more capacity per content for the metadata.

    The new Windows version codenamed “Longhorn” is supposed to be finished two years from now – but we can already see that the database paradigm fundamentally changes the basic principles of standard user interfaces: the on screen items are less about managing files but rather about managing tasks. Files (or objects) will always be related to other files, contacts, tasks, dates, places, and so on. The graphical user interface will become object oriented.

    If you knew me for longer you’d know that I have always been a supporter of the idea to hypertextualize the desktop and offer users more ways to describe context and relations. The database paradigm is a technological prerequisite to achieve this and to finally realize Ted Nelsons familiar vision of a hypertext OS.

  • 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:

    Peter Baumgartner asks why german universities do not seem to get hooked by this trend:

    … one can observe a general reluctance to introducing weblogs in education and teaching. From my personal point of view a fundamentally wrong conception of education is the main reason for the absence of weblogs in education. Under the still common assumption knowledge should be transferred by teachers/professors to students. […] If weblogs are used in education on a large scale, they won’t be just an add-on but they will change radically our way of teaching. But the mentioned “if” is of major importance as the blogosphere will attack the interests of traditional teaching institutions – at least at university or postgraduate level.

  • 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.

  • On Outliners

    Here is a teriffic series of articles about outliner software:

  • 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 reality, while designers invent a different future is a common theme. Thus, while both methods of thinking are hypothesis-driven, the design hypothesis differs from the scientific hypothesis.

    [via IDblog]

  • 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 Rotman school of management at the University of Toronto.

    The PDF is 76 pages, and in a couple of scans I couldn’t find a mention of the HBS blurb, which you can actually read here (see item #9):
    Businesses have come to realize that the only way to differentiate their offerings is to make them beautiful and emotionallly compelling — which explains why an arts degree is now a hot credential in management.
    In any case, there are some very interesting articles in the Rotman magazine. Looks like it’s well worth the download.

    MFA the new MBA because communication design skills got more important? There is more to that: It is not only the results designers create that can be more effective. In many ways it’s the methodology to generate innovations and think of alternatives as well. It has been observable for a long time now that university programs import design know how to limit negative effects of the growing importance of communication for their graduates.

  • 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 event.

  • 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 in Vienna. It will be the weekend before the BlogTalk 2.0 conference.