Terugblik op PublicSpaces Conferentie 2024

An article, posted 6 months ago filed in microsoft, google, kimvsparrentak, europa, public, cloud, azure, AWS, amazon, eu & ibm.

Veel inspirerende en mooie woorden dit jaar op PublicSpaces Conferentie 2024, maar vrij van zorgen was ik erna niet. Op de tweede dag sprak Bert Hubert uit in een jolig pessimistisch verhaal dat hij er vanuit gaat dat over enkele jaren 98% van de e-mails verzonden wordt vanuit dan wel servers van Microsoft dan wel Google. Ik hoopte na de PublicSpaces conferentie terug te gaan met nieuwe moed en handgrepen een kleine bijdrage te kunnen leveren om deze beweging te kenteren, maar desillusie is het gevoel dat me beklijft. Misschien moeten we hoop hebben dat de uit de DMA act volgende aanscherping van de aanbestedingsregels helpt om te voorkomen dat de grote partijen niet alles op kunnen slikken, zoals Kim van Sparrentak (MEP voor GroenLinks, voor wie ik eerder een positief stemadvies gaf) aangaf. Maar terwijl [Amsterdam trots aankondigt bezit te zijn met een "autonome strategie"](https://a…

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We don't need more silos

An article, posted about 8 years ago filed in opendata, open, data, ios, apple, microsoft, apps, mobile & android.

Apps are a great commercial succes. Every new operating system is claimed to be doomed. Still, most people use only 3 apps, 80% of the time (and 10 apps total 96% of the time).

While we cherish simple, little and focussed, these constitute a too limited view on what software could be. Not because simple, little and focussed is bad, but because many apps lack an important bit: interconnectivity. Most apps are silos.

We need integration

Integration nowadays is limited to simple sharing (typically ironically mostly urls) and a look and feel of the applications which is carefully described in Human Interface Guidelines that make things look integrated, like these: iOS UI guidelines and Android Material Design.

Still, wh…

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Introducing Workbook, a new rubygem

Sorry non-techies, this is really for (ruby-)techies.

For some time I've been working on a ruby gem that helps me on my project work, and may also help other ruby programmers, to work with table imports and exports more easily. Although there are other gems that allow you to read and write to different formats, of which the roo-gem is probably the most well know, I was particularly interested in writing Excel files based on templates.

I wanted to offer my clients more user-friendly Excel files that used some of the more advanced functionality of modern Spreadsheets (AutoFilter, printer styles) that couldn’t be offered by just manipulating styles and formatting using the existing rubygems. Which got me started to think about creating templates to start from, instead of starting from scratch using one of the Gems. Using another Excel file, however, wasn’t as easy as expected and here is where the Workbook gem comes in: to make that easier. Ad…

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