Yesterday I got an email telling me that I was invited to an acquaintance's birthday party, together with some 30-odd people, most of which I didn't know. The email contained an .ics invitation as an attachment, one of these little files created by, for example, MS Outlook or Apple iCal. The .ics file carries information [...]

My gadgets seem to have formed a kind of energy conspiracy: I’m at the “Mensch und Computer” conference in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, and not only does my indisposable indispensable PowerBook’s battery not last no more than 75 minutes (if I’m lucky). I brought three sets of rechargable batteries for my digital camera, I even tested them [...]

As some of you might know, I’m not too fond of Microsoft products or their business demeanor. So maybe please excuse my little rant on the Redmond company … It’s funny how they’ve been getting away with shipping product after product that features bugs, usability glitches, and plain oversights. But well, there’s the old IT [...]

Whenever I’m booking a hotel for travel within Germany or abroad, one of my first destinations is hrs.com – a hotel reservation website. It gives you real-time info on hotel availibility, sometimes special rates, great photos, contact information, maps and routes. Its web front-end is easy to use, and they’ve got very friendly staff on [...]

I’m opening a new category here – “Broken UX”. It’s supposed to be similar to Mark Hurst’s great thisisbroken.com website … describing some opportunities for organizations to just perform better. This first post deals with my (first and – presumably – last) shopping experience at Quelle.de.
Two weeks ago, I wanted to get a telephone for [...]