Once you get used to a great tool you don’t want to use anything else. But people who only use mediocre tools don’t even know that they need something better. Or even worse: They don’t like the better tool at first. Let me give you some examples… (This blog posting is somewhat related to Cheap plastic drills).

This mini series about “Offline Web Applications” shows you how to build a web application that your users can use while they are offline. I will give a session about this topic at Herbstcampus 2012.

This weekend I was at SoCraTes Conference in Rückersbach (near Frankfurt), Germany. Over 70 great software developers, in a hotel for the whole weekend, eager to learn and teach and share and have fun… This must work, right? And it did! The conference was absolutely, truly fantastic!

I did not agree with everything I saw there, but I don’t want to spoil this post with too much criticism. I will (probably) write another post about things I see differently than some people at the conference.

This blog posting is part of the Freelancer to entrepreneur series.

Finally! The landing page of zenSMB is online! Now I can tell you, dear reader, what I was working on in the last few weeks:

Update 2021: This post is extremely out-dated. You might want to goole “CSS FlexBox” or “CSS Grid” instead of reading it ;)

Update: When I wrote this blog post, I confused “vertically” with “horizontally”. I hope you can forgive me. This is how you can really align divs vertically. This article shows you how to align form fields horizontally.

In the last few weeks I was doing a lot of HTML and CSS again (after working on a WPF right client application for 1 1/2 years). One of the first things I had to do was to design an input form where the form fields have labels and are horizontally aligned. Here is how I solved it.

Other posts in this series:

• zenSMB: Landing page online
• 3...2...1... Launch

This is the second time I work on a product (*). The first time we didn’t even release anything, but we learned a lot. This time is different in a lot of ways. This time I am alone. I’ll try to release as early as possible. And I will try to be as open as possible about what I do - by writing about it here, on my blog. I don’t know if I’ll succeed this time, but I am pretty sure that I can go back to freelancing if I run out of money. This is the first posting in a (hopefully long) series about my current project.

Two weeks ago, Daniel Lieske, one of my favourite artists, posted something very interesting in his blog. Daniel works on a graphic novel called The Wormworld Saga of which he has released three chapters so far. For the fourth chapter he has changed the way he works.

This interview is the first in a series of interviews with software developers. I will add more interviews in the coming months.

Some days ago I stumbled upon this year’s commencement speech at Harvard University by Fareed Zakaria (I found it via Armin Wolf). You should watch it, it is totally inspiring!

The videos from this year’s con-fess conference are available now. I have embedded a short video of my talk about “Apache Wicket and AJAX” in this blog post. The whole video can be found on the conference pages: http://2012.con-fess.com/en/sessions/-/details/113/Apache-Wicket-and-AJAX.