Notes from Prof. Dipl.-Des. Oliver Wrede
iPod killers? I don’t think so…
Here is a very detailed article about concurrent products for the Apple iPod called “iPod Killers for Christmas 2006” (and an older one for Summer 2006). And I think to some extent the article exhibits, why all those vendors remain unsuccsessful to decrease the market share of the iPod. It is not a question of…
Do you remember early assignments in study projects?
One of the important things you need to work out as a design educator is what you will give out as first assignment in a seminar or project. It is like a warm-up for a project, something that helps you to move into the problem domain quickly. Of course there is usually plenty of material…
New address for the german weblog
My German weblog [RSS-Feed] now has a new URL. I aligned its design to this English blog here. The German site is build on WordPress – this blog here is a mix of Tinderbox for editing and Zope on the server.
Design and organisations
I had a phone conversation with a friend who works in a planning department of one of the largest corporations in the world. We were discussing the experiences of many employees in large organisations (she is a fan of Dilbert therefore). I was reminded of the »Design and organisations« seminar I did five years ago.…
YouTube aquired by Google
There were rumors around about Goolge bying YouTube for $1,65 billion. Now the YouTube founders themselves posted a small video announcing the deal: Like this guy I think it will be a extremely interesting question how Google will deal with the copyright violations in the end. Update: Something doesn’t just feel right about these guys…
Webmontag Cologne one week later!
Please spread the word: The Webmontag-Event in Cologne was pushed one week (from 2nd October to the 9th October).
Pathways
Pathways is a little mapping tool for Wikipedia. It represents visited Wikipedia pages with a graphical network of boxes. Once you have collected and arranged a map view of your Wikipedia session, you can save the result as a Pathway file. The files Pathway creates are XML. So it should be very easy to transform…
Grazr
This must be one of Dave Winers favourites: Grazr is a DHTML based outline browser: You can link to OPML files (that again may link to OPML files). You can create virtual hierarchies of OPML files, RSS feeds and other Grazr outlines. Winer called that idea a World outline. People with a pre-WWW Internet experience…
jQuery JavaScript Framework
As I expected there have been a number of JaveScript frameworks in the making. One I just heard of is jQuery. It is supposed to be easier to use than its counterparts.
Weblogs and learning
I was staying away from discussion about weblogs in education for a longer time. Partly because I had other things to do and partly because I wanted to refocus my thoughts (thus getting outside the loop was good). I found that a some articles have quoted the »Weblogs and discourse« (new URL!) paper. One is…
Cellcast.de
Cellcast.de is a german website that allows to create podcasts from mobile phone calls. Simple & straight forward.
Simplicity in Linz
Tobias, Tim and Konstantin visited the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. The topic was »simplicity«. They have provided some insightful comments. With the exception of a presentation of John Maeda (video, website) there seemed to be little progress in the discussion about the notion of simplicity. Obviously the term »simplicity« is a term that can’t…
Weblogs & Discourse paper new link
Weblogs and Discourse – BlogTalk 2003 paper moved.
WebnoteHappy
WebnoteHappy is a nifty little application that makes life with bookmarks (both in browser and on del.icio.us) much easier. It is a $25 dollar shareware with a 30 day free trial. More generally thinking I asked myself how many people actually do Paypal donations on “donationware”? Would these little applications make a better profit if…
Plone 2.5
There is a new version of Plone out for some weeks now as well as a roadmap for future releases. The homepage of plone.org has also been redesigner to emphasize the key selling arguments of the Plone CMS. I have seen in the “inner workings” of a number of content management systems. I think Plone…
Leopard preview
Keynote presentations from the WWDC are always very entertaining to watch – even though the author of this Wired article thinks the presentation was uninspiring. I don’t think so. The business numbers were impressive. Apple sales and market share is growing. That is a change. Apple always had a small market share. The machines were…
Aptana IDE for Eclipse
The Aptana IDE is an add-on that turns the Eclipse IDE into a comfortable HTML Editor. The screencasts indeed look very promising. See yourself.
Got any book recommendations?