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.

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 ...

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

Mailbox acquired by Dropbox

That comes as a bit of a surprise: Mailbox, the latest attempt in providing a modern, mobile-first user experience for eMail, has been acquired by Dropbox. I hadn't expected Mailbox to be acquired that quickly after their carefully orchestrated and much-hyped launch. I hope they continue working on their vision. Though I have one or two smaller gripes about missing features, there's a lot of potential in their design.

Friday March 15th, 2013 by Bjoern in Mobile Applications

User Efficiency vs. Machine Efficiency

Nice example on how machine efficiency doesn't necessarily equal user efficiency: For example, which of the following takes less time? Heating water in a microwave for one minute and ten seconds or heating it for one minute and eleven seconds? From the standpoint of the microwave, one minute and ten seconds is the obviously correct answer. From the standpoint of the user of the microwave, one minute and eleven seconds is faster. Why? Because in the first case, the user must press the ...

Tuesday March 12th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Software

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

Big-O Notation Explained Nicely And Concisely

John Cook has a post that nicely summarizes Big-O and related notations.

Saturday March 9th, 2013 by Bjoern in Software

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

The World Runs On Excel

There's been a lot of talk lately about the importance of Excel and that Excel is everywhere. I'd even go as far as saying that most of the world in one way or another runs on Excel. Excel in my opinion is the best piece of software Microsoft has made so far (other people seem to agree with me, by the way). While Microsoft didn't invent the spreadsheet - that credit goes to VisiCalc and IBM with Lotus 1-2-3 - they were ...

Saturday February 16th, 2013 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.