[Sigia-l] storing pattern libraries

[Austin Govella]

On 9/26/07, Ziya Oz <listera at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > We've developed customized patterns for our products, and we've had
> > good success using stencils for very rapid wireframing.
>
> How do you handle temporal/interactive aspects of patterns in wireframing,
> or are these static patterns? How do consumers of this system then browse
> the patterns? Do you have an integrated HTML or OS-specific renderer for
> that?

First, it's new, so though we've encountered a few limitations, I'm
sure more will emerge as we learn how to hack the system to best work
for us.

Temporal/interactive aspects -- if I understand the question correctly
-- would be handled by creating a separate "version" of that pattern.
There's a disconnect that happens here: if the new version becomes the
new standard, then documents that reference the old version will need
to be manually updated, and if the old version has a foundational
change that *should* affect the new version, then we'll need to update
either the new version of the pattern, the documents that reference
that pattern, or both.

Currently, the consumers of the system are only IAs, and you navigate
a folder taxonomy to find files that use a specific set of naming
conventions to find the *image* of the pattern to import. (The image
of the pattern is currently annotated outside of the system in legacy
documents, though, for the future, I believe we hope to annotate
inside the system.)

So, there is no specific renderer. The initial target is to have an
organic, growing collection of patterns that we can reference so we
can think about interaction and architecture, rather than wireframing
the same elements we've wireframed a million times before.

We have dreams of pattern libraries for developers and more dreams for
prototyping. As you mentioned earlier, such beasts have very different
needs.



-- 
Austin Govella
Thinking & Making: http://thinkingandmaking.com
Thinking Links: http://thinkingandmaking.com/links