my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

beyond tellerrand 2015

Last week I attended beyond tellerrand 2015 in Düsseldorf. This year marked the fifth iteration of the event. It was once again a fantastic two days filled to the brim with a wide range of inspiring, insightful and technical talks about design. In the next few weeks I'll be posting more about some of the talks including live recordings as those become available. Until then I'll leave you with the marvellous opening titles for this year's conference, created by the Barcelona-based audiovisual ...

UX Time: Responsive Tables and Smoothly Scrolling Through Large Datasets

Today I'd like to introduce two nifty and very useful tools and techniques for better visualizing tabular data on the Web: Responsive Tables in Pure CSS: This technique (code available here) makes clever use of :before and :after pseudo elements in order to nicely display responsive HTML tables on mobile devices (or any device with a smaller screen size for that matter) without any changes to the HTML code or having to resort to JavaScript. Clusterize.js, a JavaScript plugin that allows you to ...

Sunday May 17th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

The Turing Exception by William Hertling

About a year ago I wrote about the "Avogadro Corp" by William Hertling, the first book of his Singularity Series. A week ago I finished reading "The Turing Exception", the fourth and final instalment and a worthy close to the series. The Turing Exception follows common patterns of the series. Avogadro Corp was set in 2015 with its sequels taking place 10 years later each. With The Turing Exception we've now arrived at around 2045 and in a world that in some ...

Sunday May 10th, 2015 by Bjoern in Ideas

JHipster: A Spring / AngularJS App Generator

You're a boring, hoary Java developer but secretly always wanted to belong to that hip JavaScript-Single-Page-Application crowd? Well, with JHipster now you can! On a more serious note, JHipster is a Yeoman generator that lets you bootstrap integrated Java (for the back-end server stuff) / AngularJS (for everything front-end and UI) web apps. JHipster makes use of proven technologies such as: Grunt Bower AngularJS Maven Spring Boot Spring Web MVC The project's goal is to provide the means for easily creating a beautiful state-of-the-art HTML5 / CSS3 / JavaScript ...

Sunday May 3rd, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Web Applications

Some Free Design Resources

Pexels (a free stock photo site) have published a small but useful list of free design resources on their blog. From typography, icons and colour palettes to free design tools such as GIMP or Inkscape, the list is far from comprehensive but contains helpful stuff nevertheless.

Sunday April 26th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development

SheetJS – Parse And Manipulate Excel Spreadsheets In The Browser

SheetJS (source code available on GitHub) is an extremely useful JavaScript library that enables you to have Microsoft Excel spreadsheets parsed directly in the browser without any backend interaction necessary. What makes SheetJS even more impressive is the ability to query spreadsheets in-place with an SQLite-compatible SQL language called WebSQL. Check out the example on the website to see how awesome this is. Together with a grid component such as Handsontable (source code) SheetJS allows for on-the-fly display, querying and manipulation of Excel ...

Sunday April 19th, 2015 by Bjoern in Web Applications

favico.js – Dynamic Content For Your Favicon

favico.js (source code on GitHub) is an interesting and possibly quite useful library that makes it possible to show dynamic, animated content in your web app's favicon. While it allows you to display all sorts of visual next to the browser's address bar - such as videos or even web cams live streams - the most useful use case favico.js lends itself to probably is displaying badges and notifications. favico.js provides animations, colour customization and custom fonts for these badges. Check out the ...

Sunday April 12th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web Applications

I don’t want an app for that

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame recently posted an article on why your phone interface is a legacy train wreck. He argues that the way we interact with our smartphones goes all the way back to the beginning of desktop computing. In spite of what Apple probably would have us believe - in spite of swiping, tapping and multitouch - we're still largely using our computing devices as if they were a 1987 IBM PC running Microsoft Word or Excel: When trying ...

Sunday April 5th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Mobile Applications, Web

Antiwork – Rethinking Work Ethic Or: Hard Work is Not Working

In a highly interesting recent article Brian Dean calls for a a radical shift in how we view “jobs”. He poses a seemingly radical question: "Over a decade into the 21st century, we seem as work-obsessed as ever. Is it time for a progressive reframing of work and leisure?" Drawing upon other recent articles such as the already famous one by anthropologist David Graeber on the phenomenon of bullshit jobs Dean argues that in the 21s century our work culture and work ethic is ...

Sunday March 29th, 2015 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship

Eko: A Digital Stethoscope Add-On

At times you come across novel designs and solutions and instantly think "Of course. Why hasn't anybody thought about this before?". One such moment for me recently was finding out about Eko, a digital device that can be connected to almost every make of traditional analogue stethoscopes. Once connected, Eko automatically collects, amplifies and filters audio data recorded from the stethoscope's membrane. This data can be analyzed with accompanying software in order to find patterns. Eko looks like an excellent design that not ...

Sunday March 22nd, 2015 by Bjoern in Design

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.