[Sigia-l] storing pattern libraries

[Paola Kathuria]

Juan Ruiz wrote:
> What are
> your comments regarding Yahoo Developers Network pattern libraries? Do
> you think they cover most of the patterns? How about the documentation?
> http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/index.php

I haven't used the Yahoo library in earnest; I've just
had a poke around but mailed here about it rcently. It's
certainly not complete and the few pages I looked at
seemed overly complicated if one was in the middle of
wanting to get a job done.

People will need such a design library in different
stages of their project and these must be represented
by different navigation schemes:

"WHAT is there?" = what designs exist? (= browse the
library). Yahoo do this in their library but at the
problem-category level.

"HOW do I do [x]?" = task-specific, e.g., "I need to
copy from one list to another" (= search the library)

"WHY is it done like that?" - the reasoning behind each
'pattern', with pros and cons of alternative approaches.

I think that the WHAT and HOW demand two different entry
points into the library and two entirely different ways
of navigating. I suspect one could get to the WHY from
the 'pattern' page. I'd also like to see a discussion
area on each 'pattern' page because there's always
room for improvement!

In any case, besides Yahoo, I've seen people accumulate
UI examples on Flickr. I don't think that either are the
best but hopefully the next design library will be an
improvement on what already exists.


Paola
--
http://www.paolability.com/