Notes from Prof. Dipl.-Des. Oliver Wrede
6 billion Others
This is a very nice project by Yann-Arthus Bertrand that shows video portraits of 6000 randomly picked people in 65 countires that are talking about personal things.
Hobnox is hiring!
Hobnox (the internet start-up I am CD for) is hiring: art director web/screen designer system administrator senior developers for C, Flash, PHP and Java junior developers for C, Flash, PHP and Java Work location is Cologne, Germany. More information here. The project is related to WebTV and the entertainment-/music business. It is an international company.…
Freedom to facism
This blog is about Interfacedesign. But these days it is important to see political implications of anything. So I have a post about a movie done by Aaron Russo.
‘If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.’
This (german) article talks about digg.com stopping to censor articles that could lead to legal issues for Digg.com. The problematic article contained some code from an Equadorian blogger that allows to crack HD-DVD content. Of course the film industry wanted to keep that information confidential. Kevin Rose – one of the founders of digg.com –…
Blog lag….
There has been no post here for over a month now. I really feel bad about that as I can see from different stats, that there are more than 550 subscribers to this blog (slowly growing) – which is not too much compared to some other blogs… but a hell lot of people for me.…
UI Design and market success
While researching some information about user interfaces for video sharing websites I stumbled over a statement in an article at news.com by Alonso Vera of NASA Ames Research: »Design is starting to change who succeeds and who fails. A few years ago that wasn’t true. If I had a better algorithm, I would win!« I…
Yahoo Pipes experiments
I played around with Yahoo Pipes a bit. I created a pipe that collects several RSS feeds of different blogs I write, comments I make on other blogs, new bookmarks and photos, etc. It’s basically a summary of (almost) everything I do in the blogsphere, and it was quite easy to do. This is the…
Luke Wroblewski on Design thinking
On the »SHIFT« conference Luke Wroblowski presented his ideas about »Design thinking« (see his post here). I think there is a lot of refreshed awareness in die business community about what »design thinking« might be and if it can help to improve business processes, services and products. Right now it seems there is a lot…
DRM-free music from Apple?
Here is an open letter by Steve Jobs about why the music industry might consider selling their msuic online free from any digital rights management system (DRM). Basically he claims that more than 90% of the music sold is DRM free (on DRM-free Audio CDs) and that only 3% of music on an average iPod…
Multi-touch screens
Tobias Jordans pointed to a new astonishing video of a 8-by-3 inch two-panel multi-touch sensitive wall mounted screen: The video makes evident, that the interaction feels continuous and natural. And since Apple has shown with the iPhone that multi-touch can improve small interfaces as well, I think this technology could replace the mouse one day.…
Scrivener
I always had a special interest in tools that help authors to think. Outliners were fine, but they very often lacked visual context. Some mind mapping tools were fine – but these often did not do a good job maintaining a coherent structure in the text or good typography. Scrivener just seems to be a…
The iPhone principle
Yesterday Apple introduced the new iPhone. It features a very precise touch screen and some other sensors. On the first look it may only seem like a fancy phone that manages to get rid of buttons and integrate features of an iPod. But I think it is much more than that. I believe Apple has…
Desire (Design and Democracy)
I think the current Privacy/We-blog seminar (see blog) is turning out very well. The students are working on a project that is very “web2.0-ish” and a profound reflection on the business models that drive this market (or new bubble if you will). One of the questions that constantly return to me is what is the…
James Allchin on Macintosh
According to this Computerworld article Microsoft long time Windows development chief James Allchin wrote an internal memo in January 2004 about the product quality policies within Microsoft: “I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are,…
CSSEdit
CSSEdit appears to be one of the best CSS Editors for Macintosh around. Xyle Scope was a perfect tool to analyze CSS, but CSSEdit includes a very good editor.
The rats leave the sinking ship…
Prominent neo-con RIchard Perle is now blaming the Bush administration for failure in Iraq: “I probably would have said, ‘Let’s consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists,’” he told Vanity Fair magazine in its upcoming January issue. Kenneth Adelman, another…
Global Warming Price Tag – $7 Trillion
BBC reports: A report by economist Sir Nicholas Stern suggests that global warming could shrink the global economy by 20%. But taking action now would cost just 1% of global gross domestic product, the 700-page study says. Tony Blair said the Stern Review showed that scientific evidence of global warming was “overwhelming” and its consequences…
libavg – Kiss Director goodbye?
libavg is a very interesting package for multimedia installations: libavg is a high-level multimedia platform with a focus on interactive installations. It is meant to pick up where Macromedia Director leaves off and gives you high-quality hardware-accelerated visuals as well as easy and flexible authoring, testing and deployment. libavg integrates well with other open-source solutions…
The beginning of the end
Nothing to add to this one….
Why I like online video
Disregarding the legal issues with copyrighted material on YouTubes and Google Video servers (I can’t check those as a regular user), there are some clips where I am simply glad that they are available online, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to see them: documentaries, political commentaries and satire. Just some examples: Commentary: Olbermann on…
Got any book recommendations?