Via Scripting News[which is really good, by the way]: A really nice collection of UI patterns and practices.

The whole patterns movement, I think, seems pretty useful. I know the Design Patterns book was for me, at least in terms of thinking about and communicating design ideas. It's also fun to have these little flashes of recognition while you're reading; either "I've done that" or "DOH! I should have done that".

On the other hand, like nuclear power and photoshop plugins, the authoring of a design pattern is best left to someone with pretty good judgment. Calling something a best practice doesn't necessarily make it so.
posted on 8/15/2002 10:53:00 AM

I haven't seen a lot of new stuff on the SVG horizon, which is a bit of a bummer. Flash certainly has a lot more support blogwise and developerwise.

I think SVG has tons of promise, especially as an easily-assemblable vector graphics format. I love the standardness of it, the inclusion of EMCAscript (javascript) and SMIL, the very simple model it uses. In fact, the big reason that I have done a bit more with SVG so far is that the SVG model makes a whole lot more sense to me than Flash's filmstrip-based model. (Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it makes more sense to animators and such, but with the addition of ActionScript, the whole thing feels like a kludge.)

Flash has a lot of promise too, in the middleweight app front, but there's a whole lot I have to say about the category, and I'm saving it for later this week.

I really wish there were a central news site of what people are doing with SVG/Flash/etc. So, going forward, I will post random coolnesses that I find, both flash and SVG and any other shiny objects that draw my attention.




posted on 8/08/2002 12:10:00 PM