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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.

Debugging for Mobile Browsers

Occasionally, web developers need to debug a web app's behaviour in a specific browser on a specific device or class of devices. For desktop devices this usually isn't a problem because every modern browser nowadays provides a console, where application errors and custom console.log statements pile up. However, on mobile browsers there's usually no browser console, or browser development tools, for that matter. Analysing browser logs is still possible via vendors' development tools like Apple's Xcode, for example. Still, that process often ...

Should Web Apps Behave More Like UNIX Programs?

Recently, through various discussions about the nature of the web and web applications I came up with an intriguing (to me at least ...) idea: Web apps should behave like UNIX command-line tools. Please hear me out and let me elaborate. Probably the most widespread pattern in modern web app development is that of single-page applications (SPAs). Though that particular term isn't used as abundantly anymore as it used to be a few years ago the design pattern it promoted still persists: Web apps ...

Sunday May 14th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Software, Web, Web Applications

Zoltan Kollin: Misused mobile UX patterns

Zoltan Kollin, UX designer, co-organizer of the Amuse UX Conference and co-author of UX Myths (another highly recommendable collection of user experience tips and guidelines) recently wrote a post about misused mobile UX patterns. We've seen it all on the mobile platform of our choice: icons whose meaning is hard to guess the dreaded hamburger menu and hidden screens inconsistent gestures and features that are hidden behind them Zoltan mentions those and a few more bad practices, explains why they're bad and gives examples of better ...

Sunday December 20th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Web Applications

Stephanie Rieger – The Emerging Global Web

In this presentation Stephanie Rieger talks about how the web is accessed and used in emerging economies in Africa and Asia and why mobile plays a dominant role in developing countries: Stephanie Rieger – The Emerging Global Web – beyond tellerrand DÜSSELDORF 2015 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. From a developed economy point of view this is very intriguing. Though mobile devices already dominate the market in developed economies and mobile-first is the dominant design approach for new websites and apps in ...

Sunday October 25th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Web, Web Applications

Toby Shapshak: You don’t need an app for that

In a 2013 TED talk South African writer Toby Shapshak talks about innovation out of necessity and how entrepreneurs in Africa are solving real-world problems for both their own continent and the world as a whole:

Sunday October 11th, 2015 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Web

Jeremy Keith – Enhance!

Much in line with the talk about advancing the web without breaking it in his talk at beyond tellerrand this year Jeremy Keith argues for the benefits of starting with simple solutions to the problem at hand and building upon a solid foundation instead of giving in to the temptation starting out with ever more complex layers upon layers of complex tools and frameworks. Jeremy advocates progressive enhancement, that is making content accessible to every platform and browser while still using the ...

Sunday September 27th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Web, Web Applications

Christian Heilmann – Advancing the web without breaking it?

Web development today is characterized by a constant, rapid flow of new frameworks, CSS preprocessors, task runners, package managers, asset pipelines ... Angular, Ember.js, Backbone, React, Flux, Grunt, Gulp. Every week or so it seems there's a new JavaScript framework that does everything better than everything else before. We need to jump ship ever more frequently if we want to keep up and stay on the bleeding edge. There's constant bickering about which framework is better and which framework du jour ...

Sunday September 20th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Mobile Applications, Web, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann