Eric Grohe demonstrates unbelieveable creativity. He paints unusual and extremely impressive pictures on the walls. His creations are supposed to bring more colors and space into our grayed out cubicle living, prolonging the space and time. I can swear he has much more works. Does anyone know some other locations on the net to enjoy his wonderful art? Before: After:

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Yesterday I saw a wonderful post by Francois Gossieaux telling us, the readers, about his own observations of the Web 2.0 evolution. It required some time to structure my own thoughts on this and here I would like to comment just a few of his points and broaden the discussion onto the whole world of software development carried on nowadays.

Many of the new web 2.0 companies are built by a few passionate individuals - and with budgets that fit on credit cards. And forget about traditional marketing expenses - it’s all word-of-mouth, sometimes enhanced with a few dollars worth of search engine marketing - but gone are the days of expensive direct marketing campaigns and traditional promotions. It’s all about influencing the influencers - but more on that later…

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Here comes an interesting piece of software — KlipFolio. It’s the desktop-integrated RSS reader and can do far more than that. It is capable of showing stock news, the weather and lots of other interesting bits of information. Here’s what the authors tell about their creation:

It’s the smallest, smartest and most configurable RSS Dashboard on the planet. KlipFolio can be used to monitor anything you want online–like weather, stocks, Hotmail, news, RSS feeds and even auctions–right on your desktop.

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Couple of years ago I wrote a small application to manage a post cards distribution for a small advertising company. The application worked with a Cloudscape database but it’s not the point. The point is that my friend, who was working for that company, asked me to help with some strange problem. After the hardware upgrade all of the records in the database became invisible. I need to say that there is a screen where you can examine the amounts of cards sent to a different organizations at the given dates, and there is another screen where you can build a comprehensive reports with the same information but for a given dates range. Well, the records were not visible on the single-date statistics page, but they were in the reports. I was shocked…

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Check this out in the mean time: Leo Burnett’s design studio. You will be impressed with the design, variety of user-interface solutions and visual effects. I fancy the idea of making non-linear interfaces and avoiding menu-ish look. The existing paradigm has turned into habits of our users already and its dearly hard to break this stereotype. The more applications we write, the more our users go down into the swamp of their stereotypes. The sites (which are also the applications of some sort), like Leo Burnett’s, is a lot of fun to the visitor not only for its fancy graphics, but also for its navigation approach. It doesn’t grate on your eyes since it looks unusual and surprising at first. Two minutes of education and you are “operating” the site, like a pro, since it’s still intuitive and easy to learn. When you are in “free flight”, it’s hard to maintain overall style and paradigm of your user interface because you aren’t bounded in your choices and it’s up to you how your creation will look and feel.

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Often we deal with database. Data is flying back and forth between application and data store. Following the modern influences, we wish to have tested everything that might break some day. When you get enough experience and develop the sense of well code design, this task will become easy and straightforward, but unfortunately I can see very often bad samples of code separation and awful design. So what it is all about?

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