From the desk of

Monat: November 2012

  • Und nochmal: Zeitung.

    An nahe­zu jedem Com­pu­ter wer­den wir dar­an erin­nert, dass es eine Zeit gab, in der Tages­zei­tun­gen die tech­no­lo­gi­sche Ent­wick­lung getrie­ben haben. Die Schrift „Times New Roman“ hat ihren Namen von ihrem Auf­trag­ge­ber und ihrer Ver­wen­dung: Die Lon­don Times lies eine Schrift ent­wer­fen, die auf den damals neu auf­kom­men­den Rota­ti­ons­pres­sen auch bei höhe­ren Geschwin­dig­kei­ten mög­lichst gut…

  • You can’t outfacebook Facebook.

    We all have seen Twit­ter chan­ging their public face in the last six months. They inhi­bit cli­ents by third par­ties, they have strong rules on how to dis­play tweets – in short, they’­re tur­ning from a plat­form com­pa­ny into a pro­duct com­pa­ny. Theo­ries as to why they do so all point in the same direc­tion: they’­re…

  • Source Code as an act of communication

    Taking from the last lon­ger pie­ce and a very good idea that @codePrincess lin­ked to in a blog post: Code that says what it does. Of cour­se, source code also is a medi­um of com­mu­ni­ca­ti­on bet­ween human and human – but the per­son you are wri­ting for may just be the future you. And just…

  • Icons from the future

    Some­thing that I’d tru­ly like to see is smar­ter icons, both on iOS and the desktop. What if your icon were a litt­le, con­stant­ly run­ning snip­pet of Java­Script code that had access to the files within the appli­ca­ti­on that brought it along? That way, the app could store sta­te infor­ma­ti­on for various times the icon…

  • User Interfaces as an act of communication

    Even though we tend to com­ple­te­ly for­get about that, soft­ware quite often is a means of com­mu­ni­ca­ti­on bet­ween humans. I am not refer­ring to the way the pro­duct gets used (and a lot of soft­ware nowa­days is used for direct human to human com­mu­ni­ca­ti­ons, be that one-to-one or one-to-many) but rather that the enti­re user…