Michael Dietz

In today's world, in which recruiters heavily use the web to gain more information about their applicants, a positive online profile has become very important. This normally means additional effort for everybody to polish their LinkedIn, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. accounts and blogs. But this can also be beneficial for everybody, if it is utilized in the right way.

.... To cut a long story short. I've used this in a way that explains my personal profile and also shows my fable for web design and visualization. I call this my "Visual Vitae".

You can check it out here, and don't worry it is encrypted and doesn't show my real profile: 

http://space-labs.appspot.com/repo/70001/index.html

As already mentioned, this blog should also deal with the topic Design Thinking. Now it's time to do the first steps towards this topic.

Design Thinking is an holistic approach to solve complex problems and generate new and innovative ideas. In order to bring this approach closed to everybody I've prepared an small website which explains the most interesting parts of the model.

"Space Labs" has just entered the world of Quick Web Prototyping. With Space Labs it is sooooo easy to develop new prototypes of web sites, mobile web apps, web designs, human interaction designs and much more. You can even mock-up some server side APIs by simply developing JavaScript.

Space Labs has just been released as restricted beta. If you're interested just request an invitation and then start prototyping and innovating. 

What makes an idea unique?

Idea are generated every day, but many of them are rather technical. In that area people are often thinking about: how can we realize this idea? Is it techically feasible?

But this is not the only dimension of a good idea. But what makes a valueable innovation? Therefore I always use a technique I’d call “startupability”. Simply imagine that you are going to create a startup businesss with that idea. Think about how you would present it to investors in a pitch or how you would sell it to customer. Think about the value which the customer has by applying your idea.

In the last weeks and months the preparation of my lecture at the Cooperative State University of Mannheim has kept me very busy. Now my documents and materials are nearly finished and I've time again to blog about interesting topics. 

For my lecture I've prepared one sub-chapter about the global positioning system, better known as GPS. While I was doing so I was thinking: Oh oh oh, so much theorie and so much text and I started to explore new ways to explain this topic. The result had been the following interactive GPS learning website.

http://space-labs.appspot.com/labs/run/11001

Once you enter the site it loads a map and the positions of all current GPS satellites in the orbit. By click the secondary button on your mouse you start to simulate that you are at a certain place in the world. On the right side there is a dialog box, which then guides you step by step through the process how a GPS device is able to calculate its current position.

Try it and have fun with it....

The world is full of great things, which are free. I just found one great example for this fact. On the attached website a guy named Kb (a french UI designer working for Google) offers a broad collection of his private UI designs and elements for apps and websites.

My favorite API for charts and visualizations is currently D3.js (http://d3js.org/).

They have a concept, which they call object object constancy. Sounds simple but the visual impact is amazing. Instead of rendering a chart new, each time the values change, they keep the old data and implement a nice transition to the new value.  This causes that the user can also see the impact on a certain object and the object stays constantly on the ui. (http://bost.ocks.org/mike/constancy/)

Another special concept they've implemented is the way how they are joining and binding javascript data to the HTML document. This is different from other libraries but soooo simple and powerful.

All about mobile ... here is my new project I'm currently working on. 

In February I'll start to hold a lecture at the Cooperative State University in Mannheim about "Basics of Mobile App Development". 

I already started to develop the documents, the practical parts, the assignments and also the exam of this lecture. 

In this term the focus is more to establish the basic knowledge about mobile devices and app development. The focus will be on hardware, operating systems, radio transmission, mobile communication networks, app basics, app stores, app business models, webapps vs. native apps, web design for mobile devices, webapp development, and native app development in Android.

The lecture will be structured in the following chapters:

Chapter 1: Mobile (R)Evolution - Introduction, why this market has become so important and why apple is NOT the only company which caused this (r)evolution.

Chapter 2: Hardware and OS - Focussed on the most important hardware components we'll also spent some time to tear down some example devices (e.g. an old iPhone). OS will be a smaller part focussing on the special requirements on an operating system running on a mobile device.

Chapter 3: Radio Transmission and Mobile Networks - Explaining the basics about the transmission of data via radio waves and then continuing to understand the most common mobile telecommunication networks (from GSM up to LTE) as well as other networks (Wireless LAN, GPS, NFC).

Chapter 4: Mobile Platforms and Apps - Having a look on the (currently) four most relevant mobile platforms (Android, iOS, BB, Win) and their app stores. Afterwards this chapter will deal with the basics about apps and their business models and will highlight the ways to realize a mobile app (native vs. webapp vs. hybrid).

Chapter 5: Mobile Web Design - Experiencing the benefits of HTML5, CSS3 and responsive web layouts.

Chapter 6 : Mobile WebApps with jQuery Mobile - Learning how to develop mobile webapps with the usage of jQuery and jQuery Mobile. 

Chapter 7: Native App Development on Android - Studying the process to develop a native app based on Android

Welcome Everybody,

I've recently discontinued my old blog (running on my own infrastructure) and have now moved to this beautiful and new tumbler blog.

Along with this change of the location also my interests have moved in the last couple of years. From a technically focussed world I'm now more committed to topics like new innovative business models, the mobile app business, human interaction design, UI design and many more. One big topic will also be the design thinking approach, which defines a sophisticated process to find innovative solutions and ideas to complex problems & design challenges.

In the future I'll use this platform for idea sharing, education purposes and receiving feedback (e.g. on UI designs). I hope everybody enjoys it and finds a piece which he/she is interested in.