communication medium

Interface Design Skills for Coders (and vice-versa)

Like a technical peanut butter cup - two great skill sets that go great together. What really happens when artists and coders mash things up? Intuitive Interactions: Are application developers adept at effective design? I think, as a group, no - witness all of the effort put forth to wrap "user friendly screens" in front of ERPs major and minor. Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, SQLWindows, and their ilk spawned legions of wanna-be UI designers, presented with a multitude of gadgets, and…

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Practical Applications of Twitter in Manufacturing?

Over the past few weeks I've had a couple of interesting discussions about the introduction of Twitter to Manufacturing. When someone poses a question like this to me, it throws me for a minor loop, because for very basic, practical reasons, it just doesn't seem to apply. More keyboards & data entry on the floor? Not likely. However, a few months ago I wrote this rather breathless item, expounding on a brainstorm regarding the use of YouTube and Twitter in…

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Finally! Relevant Applications for YouTube and Twitter in the Enterprise!

If you are involved with manufacturing these days, you've no doubt heard about Lean Manufacturing. I'll not go deep into this area here, but one fascinating (for me) aspect is the thread (in some quarters) that ERP and computer systems are the enemy of Lean. On the whole, I don't disagree - process improvement, kanbans, and attacking muda are typically very physical exercises; roaming the floor, walking through the processes (gemba walks), reorganizing workspaces for flow, designing and simplifying standard…

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Five Best Conversations with my Meebo (web IM) Client

Back in January, I added the Meebo client to my blog page, and over the past few months I've learned a lot about web chat in general ... There are other clients out there, and I've tried a few - most recently the AIM Wimzi, which came close to unseating Meebo as my web chat client of choice. Wimzi and Google Talk will allow me to use Trillian as a client, solving two problems I have with Meebo - logging…

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