specializing in digital media technologies

Recently, and I can’t remember why, I came across Yahoo!’s Design Pattern Library. Just like a programming design pattern describes, in code, an accepted way of handling a specific task, this library has almost 60 (at this time) examples for how to layout and handle common visual elements.

The patterns are organized by category: layout, navigation, selection, rich interaction, and social. For example, there’s a pattern for showing the availability of a person (like you’d see in IM) and another for how breadcrumbs should be used. Mostly the patterns are descriptions of what you should do, based upon what’s best for the end user. Many of the patterns do have links to code examples, although those will often make use of the Yahoo! User Interface library.

Part of the design pattern library is a stencil kit, available for OmniGraffle (the program I use), Adobe Illustrator, Visio, and other applications. Using this kit you can quickly create a mock-up of the user interface. And being Yahoo!, all of this is available for free.

I StumbledUpon this article titled Making a Cool Login System with PHP, MySQL, and jQuery. It’s very slick, with a panel that slides down for the users to login or register. The article includes the complete code and a demo version. I like this approach—a separate login panel—because logging in is common to most sites but also something the user only does once per session at most, so it’s best not to take up screen space with a login form.

I recently StumbledUpon BumpTop, a commercial product that greatly changes (dare I say “revolutionizes”?) how you use your computer’s desktop. It runs on both Windows and Mac OS X and is quite reasonably priced. The best way to get a sense of BumpTop is to watch the videos available at their site. It’s just cool.