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.

Jenny Shen: UX Design Across Different Cultures

UX designer Jenny Shen recently has been featured on the Scott Hanselman's podcast with her work on UX design across different cultures. She's published a two-part summary of her experiences with cross-cultural design and internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) of websites and applications: UX Design Across Different Cultures — Part 1 UX Design Across Different Cultures — Part 2 These articles shed light on how distributing an application or publishing a website in another country not only requires translating the content and labels of UI elements but also has ...

Paul Verbeek-Mas @ RuhrJS 2017 – Calendar / Kalender / تقويم (aka, the fun of locali[zs]ation)

At RuhrJS 2017 Paul Verbeek-Mas gave an interesting talk on the joys and intricacies of i18n and l10n with regard to how time, dates and calendars are rendered in web apps:

Sunday January 7th, 2018 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

FormatJS: Localize dates and numbers

Internationalization and localization still is a somewhat difficult problem in software development. FormatJS is a collection of JavaScript libraries that addresses a part of this problem by formatting dates and numbers according to a selected locale. It makes clever use of pluralization and natural language patterns so the output strings read like a natural language utterance instead of a computer-generated string, for example it generates these outputs for 0, 1 and 1,000 items, respectively: "Annie took no photos on December 14, 2014." "Annie took ...

Sunday December 28th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

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