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.

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 ...

GoodUI Datastories

GoodUI Datastories is a new service that promises to provide companies with tried and tested UI concepts. Not every company has the time, resources and sheer number of users required to do proper A/B testing. GoodUI Datastories tries to alleviate this problem by sharing ideas and UX patterns that have been proven to work for others, e.g.: Try Smaller Commitments instead of one big one. The service allows users to submit their ideas including screenshots and traffic / conversion data as evidence the ...

Sunday March 1st, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web, Web Applications

Email as a Personal API

Some time ago I came across a concept by Marc Bevand advocating email as a Decentralized API to Personal Information. In this post he outlines the idea that - email being such a pervasive tool to the extent that nearly everyone uses it - a personal, distributed and decentralized API layer could be built on top of it. The basic idea is this: Email could be used as a protocol for transactions and automatically exchanging information. Take these use cases for example: Automatically ...

Sunday February 22nd, 2015 by Bjoern in Ideas, Web

The Future of Software

In an article titled Programming: easier, better, faster, stronger. Giuliano Iacobelli of Stamplay writes about how programming might become easier, faster and more reliable in the future while decoupling creation of business logic from the need to write actual code. It's an important subject I've written about time and time again: How do we make programming more observable and more responsive? How do we allow more people to turn ideas and business processes into software? As Chris Dixon puts it: Software not only ...

Sunday December 7th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web

Apple, Google, Microsoft – What do they do best?

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently made some interesting points about what he thinks are the core strengths of Microsoft and its competitors Apple and Google. Though I can't really say I particularly like Microsoft products or would use them as a platform or tools for my own products there's some truth to these statements: "Whereas in our case our identity really is about empowering others to build products." "[ ... ] we want to be the tools provider, the platform provider [ ... ]" Google, ...

Sunday November 23rd, 2014 by Bjoern in Business, Mobile Applications, Software, Web, Web Applications

Maciej Ceglowski – The Internet With a Human Face

More videos of the beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2014 design conference are online now. This one is Maciej Ceglowski's talk about The Internet With a Human Face: Maciej Ceglowski – The Internet With a Human Face – beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2014 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo.

Sunday October 5th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Web

Huge Potential For Mesh Networking In Mobile Phones

Apple's iOS 7 contains a highly interesting but until now very much under-appreciated feature that Apple calls Multipeer Connectivity. Another name for this feature is mesh network and it potentially can change the world. Basically, a mesh network is a network topology, in which each participant is connected to every other participant. This results in a dense network that's particularly resilient towards failures and tampering from outside. In contrast to that the computer networks we commonly use for the most part employ a ...

Sunday June 8th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web

Spotified

As innovative apps and business models go on a personal level Spotify is one of those innovations that in recent years not only provided a lot of value to me but also quite fundamentally changed an important aspect of my life: Listening to music. I happen to be a music buff with a penchant for Progressive Rock, Power Metal alongside folk metal / medieval stuff, computer games themes and occasionally interesting, novel pop music. Music streaming and discovery tool Spotify has allowed me ...

Sunday May 18th, 2014 by Bjoern in Music, Software, Web

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

OpenSSL Heartbleed Bug: Idea For New Password Management Protocol

On 07 April 2014 a very serious OpenSSL bug with the colourful name 'Heartbleed' was disclosed. You can read more about this bug here, here and on the blog of the Chuck Norris of cryptography, Bruce Schneier. You can check here if your website or a service you're using is affected by this bug. Suffice it to say that the consequences are as severe as can be for most of the core services of the Internet. GitHub, Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Evernote, Tumblr, ...

Sunday April 13th, 2014 by Bjoern in Web

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.