Über Cultured Code

Why

The greatest challenge for software design is to bridge the gap between technology and the people who use it. But there is no universally applicable solution. For every project one has to find the balance anew.

Technology and personal experience are often considered to be in opposition to each other. Technology dominating personal experience is a common topic of discussion around computers, which might provoke us to believe that experience should ultimately prevail. We believe that the two facets inspire each other reciprocally. Something new can be created from this circular process.

We are fascinated by this process, which reminds us of Yin and Yang in eastern philosophy.

What

Prototypes

We have experimented with quite a few prototypes in such diverse fields as image editing, vector graphics, and personal information management.

A Sea of Information

We settled on personal information management or "The sea of information project" as we called it. We were determined to produce a little app that would allow the user to store and make sense of all those thousands of small, and not-so-small, pieces of information that seem to float endlessly around both work and private life.

We quickly recognized that no reasonable person would bother to collect a whole life-time of information without being able to retrieve this information wherever, whenever, and on whatever platform.

Looking for a solution to this problem, Web standards appeared on our radar. XHTML/CSS, browser and OS support have reached a maturity that makes web standards meaningful for many more uses than just viewing pages on the web (see Dashboard for example).

Xyle and more

It was a surprise to discover that there was no web-editing tool allowing to analyze and author HTML and CSS in an integrated and uncluttered way. Xyle scope is our first step in providing a solution.