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.

SVG is Ready For Prime Time

At the very inspiring beyond tellerrand 2014 design conference that took place from 19 - 21 May this year in Düsseldorf (I'll write another bit or two about this conference in the next few weeks), Chris Coyier (of CSS-Tricks fame) held an interesting talk on Scalable Vector Graphics aptly titled 'SVG Is For Everybody'. In this talk Chris explained that although SVG tends to be sidelined it's quite ready for being used extensively today. To name but a few aspects: SVG allows you ...

Superhero.js

Creating, testing and maintaining a large JavaScript code base is not easy — especially since great resources on how to do this are hard to find. This page is a collection of the best articles, videos and presentations we've found on the topic. Superhero.js is a useful and comprehensive list of articles about developing, testing and maintaining JavaScript applications. It deals with fundamentals of the JavaScript language, best practices and broaches subjects such as testing, tools and security. No matter if you're JavaScript ...

Sunday April 20th, 2014 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Web, Web Applications

Natural Language User Interfaces And Internet Search

Recently, there was an article at Wired about IBM’s Watson and how IBM might be able to supersede Google as the dominant search engine by providing a question-answering kind of search engine. Every few years the idea of a natural language / semantic / question answering search engine crops up again. Indeed, natural language understanding is quite relevant for the crawling and indexing part of information retrieval systems and Google is very good at that. Just look at their quite formidable automatic translation ...

Sunday November 10th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Web Applications

SEPA: Nutzerfreundliche Eingabe von IBAN und BIC

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.In 2014 wird die Nutzung von SEPA für Banküberweisungen und Lastschrift endgültig Pflicht. An sich ist gegen eine internationale Vereinheitlichung des Zahlungsverkehrs nichts einzuwenden. Allerdings lässt die Nutzerfreundlichkeit des ganzen Verfahrens deutlich zu wünschen übrig oder wie es mal kürzlich jemand ausgedrückt hat: "SEPA ist endlich mal etwas, das für Unternehmen und Privatleute gleich kompliziert ist." Die Eingabe und Prüfung von IBAN und BIC auf den meisten Websites ist kompliziert und fehleranfällig. Es gibt verschiedene Randfälle, die ...

Sunday October 27th, 2013 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Web Applications

TimeSheets: Stundenzettel für mite.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.TimeSheets ist ein Tool, das mit mite erfasste Zeiten tabellarisch darstellt. Nach der Eingabe des mite Kontonamens und API Keys können Zeiten nach Projekten und Zeitraum abgefragt werden. TimeSheets basiert auf Bootstrap und Angular mit verschiedenen Erweiterungen für i18n, localStorage und Co. TimeSheets kann unter https://bjoernkw.github.io/TimeSheets3/ genutzt werden. Der Source Code ist unter https://github.com/BjoernKW/TimeSheets3 verfügbar.

Wednesday September 4th, 2013 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Chosen – User-friendly select boxes

HTML <select></select> boxes can be rather unwieldy and don't exactly cater for a stellar user-experience. To alleviate that pain Harvest provide a highly useful jQuery plugin that's been adequately named Chosen. Apart from a nice CSS styling Chosen adds several user interface improvements to vanilla HTML select boxes such as search, easy-to-use multiple selections and option groups. Using Chosen is as easy as adding the following JavaScript code to your website: $('select').chosen(); This will automatically spruce up and enrich every select box on your website ...

Sunday July 14th, 2013 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

A Few Notes On Responsive Design

I've been doing quite a bit of work involving responsive web design lately, which is why I thought I'd share a few useful resources I came across. First, there's an article by Luke Wroblewski about the importance of considering mobile devices first for websites and web applications. Ethan Marcotte describes foundations and some techniques of responsive web design. An article by James Young deals with 'the top responsive web design problems and how to avoid them' Brad Frost wrote about responsive navigation patterns, e.g. how ...

Sunday March 31st, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Mobile Applications

Huge List of Useful Twitter Bootstrap Resources

Bootstrap Hero has compiled a Big Badass List of Twitter Bootstrap Resources. Have a look at this useful list of tools and resources. By the way, Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone!

Sunday March 17th, 2013 by Bjoern in Front End Development

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

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.