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.

Notifications in web apps: Mailgun and Twilio

If you want your web app to notify your users upon specific actions or events Mailgun and Twilio are great solutions for doing so. The former allows you to - among various other features involving eMail - send eMails via a nice and simple REST API. This is particularly handy because you don't have to worry anymore about delivering eMail asynchronously in order not to delay user actions in the browser. For example, with Mailgun you can simply commit a registration confirmation ...

i18n is a hard and largely unsolved problem

After last week's post about the intricacies of dealing with date and time representations in software I promised to write about another seemingly simple yet surprisingly complex area of software development: Internationalization. Some time ago a I wrote about an interesting presentation on i18n and localization in Rails by Heather Rivers of Yammer. If you're in any way dealing with internationalization (i18n) and localization (L10n) of software (which you basically should if you're into software development) have a look at the video of ...

Sunday June 30th, 2013 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Web Applications

The time! The time! Who’s got the time?

I'm currently working on an app that allows you to set and display dates and times in various ways. Hence, lately I've been working quite a bit with calendars, dates, times, date localization and all the funny intricacies that come with them. To name but a few of those: In some countries the week customarily starts with Sunday, while in others it starts with Monday. Some programming languages and date APIs use 0 as the index for the first day of the week, some ...

Sunday June 23rd, 2013 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

Creative Use Of Symbol Fonts: Time Display

In his article The Era of Symbol Fonts, Brian Suda refers to Timepiece Rounded, an OpenType font that makes use of the symbol font concept and specifically ligatures to display clock hands! For instance, a time string such as "19:52:45" will be displayed as follows: The source code for this contains merely text and and a bit of CSS styling: <div class="timepiece missswiss"><span class="clock" id="missswiss" style="display: block; font-size: 226px;">19:52:45</span></div> Pretty awesome!

Sunday April 21st, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Web Applications

BromBone – Headless Browser As A Service

A few weeks ago I wrote about PhantomJS, CasperJS and how those WebKit-based tools help with web app testing. While running your own PhantomJS instance should work alright in most cases, installing, optimizing and maintaining yet another software package on all of your dev machines and continuous integration servers adds more friction to your development process. Hence, I was wondering if there's a hosted PhantomJS service. In fact, there is: BromBone - a 'headless browser as a service'. BromBone is an infrastructure-as-a-service offering ...

Sunday April 7th, 2013 by Bjoern in Web Applications

How-To: Instant Website Optimization for Retina Displays

Last month I recommended an article by Reda Lemeden about designing for Retina displays. Today, as a follow-up, if you will, I'd like to suggest reading a how-to by Kyle J. Larson on website optimization for Retina displays. 'Instant Website Optimization for Retina Displays' describes the process of creating and optimizing various website elements such as images, fonts, icons and backgrounds for high-resolution displays. The author starts off with creating high-density images and continues to outline various optimization tools and techniques. Furthermore, the ...

Wednesday March 20th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Web Applications

Acceptance Testing With PhantomJS and CasperJS

PhantomJS is a headless WebKit browser that allows you to call, test and scrape websites from the command line. In the developer's own words: PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG. CasperJS is a testing and scripting framework that builds on PhantomJS. Again, in the developer's own words: CasperJS is an open source navigation scripting & testing utility written in Javascript and based on PhantomJS ...

Sunday March 10th, 2013 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Web Applications

Browser Details – A Service For Debugging Web Apps

Browser Details allows you 'to see everything you need to know about your client's browser - and have that information sent directly to you'. After registering you'll get your own browser.details.com subdomain. If your clients are having problems with one of your web apps you can simply direct them to that subdomain and Browser Details will store (and mail) their environment information such as which browser they're using, the OS they're on, their screen resolution and so on. Browser Details offers a ...

Sunday March 3rd, 2013 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Web Applications

Continous Integration with Circle or: Coming Full Circle

I've recently tried out Circle, a hosted continuous integration service, and I'm quite thrilled about it. Registration / login works via GitHub. Once logged in, Circle lets you choose a GitHub repository and starts the first build right away. Circle claims that setup is as easy as: Sign up to Circle, Give Circle permission to access GitHub on your behalf, Click on a project repository From my experience so far this claim is absolutely correct. Configuration is completely automatic. I've only tried it with Rails so ...

Sunday February 24th, 2013 by Bjoern in Web Applications

Designing For Retina Displays

Under http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2012/08/20/towards-retina-web/ there's a nice article about what to consider in terms of high-resolution / Retina displays when designing your next website and how to address common issues with how websites are rendered on Retina displays.

Sunday February 17th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.