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.

UX Time: Responsive Tables and Smoothly Scrolling Through Large Datasets

Today I'd like to introduce two nifty and very useful tools and techniques for better visualizing tabular data on the Web: Responsive Tables in Pure CSS: This technique (code available here) makes clever use of :before and :after pseudo elements in order to nicely display responsive HTML tables on mobile devices (or any device with a smaller screen size for that matter) without any changes to the HTML code or having to resort to JavaScript. Clusterize.js, a JavaScript plugin that allows you to ...

Sunday May 17th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Some Free Design Resources

Pexels (a free stock photo site) have published a small but useful list of free design resources on their blog. From typography, icons and colour palettes to free design tools such as GIMP or Inkscape, the list is far from comprehensive but contains helpful stuff nevertheless.

Sunday April 26th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development

SheetJS – Parse And Manipulate Excel Spreadsheets In The Browser

SheetJS (source code available on GitHub) is an extremely useful JavaScript library that enables you to have Microsoft Excel spreadsheets parsed directly in the browser without any backend interaction necessary. What makes SheetJS even more impressive is the ability to query spreadsheets in-place with an SQLite-compatible SQL language called WebSQL. Check out the example on the website to see how awesome this is. Together with a grid component such as Handsontable (source code) SheetJS allows for on-the-fly display, querying and manipulation of Excel ...

Sunday April 19th, 2015 by Bjoern in Web Applications

favico.js – Dynamic Content For Your Favicon

favico.js (source code on GitHub) is an interesting and possibly quite useful library that makes it possible to show dynamic, animated content in your web app's favicon. While it allows you to display all sorts of visual next to the browser's address bar - such as videos or even web cams live streams - the most useful use case favico.js lends itself to probably is displaying badges and notifications. favico.js provides animations, colour customization and custom fonts for these badges. Check out the ...

Sunday April 12th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web Applications

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 ...

Sunday April 5th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Mobile Applications, Web

Eko: A Digital Stethoscope Add-On

At times you come across novel designs and solutions and instantly think "Of course. Why hasn't anybody thought about this before?". One such moment for me recently was finding out about Eko, a digital device that can be connected to almost every make of traditional analogue stethoscopes. Once connected, Eko automatically collects, amplifies and filters audio data recorded from the stethoscope's membrane. This data can be analyzed with accompanying software in order to find patterns. Eko looks like an excellent design that not ...

Sunday March 22nd, 2015 by Bjoern in Design

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

UX Check: Identify Usability Issues On Your Website

Recently, I came across UX Check, a Google Chrome extension that allows you to annotate usability issues according to Nielsen's ten heuristic usability evaluations. If you're dealing with website and web app usability in any way UX Check will be a useful tool and is worth checking out.

Sunday February 8th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web Applications

Impulse – Dynamic Physics Animations For The Mobile Web

Impulse is a promising new JavaScript animation framework for mobile websites. The animations generated with Impulse look very smooth and natural. Very impressive work. Go check out the examples page for a first glimpse.

Sunday October 26th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Mobile Applications, Web Applications

Stephen Hay – Maintaining Simplicity

Here's another interesting video of the beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2014 design conference. This is Stephen Hay talking about Maintaining Simplicity: Stephen Hay – Maintaining Simplicity – beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2014 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo.

Sunday October 19th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.