links for 2006-02-18

links for 2006-02-17

Rojo redesign

Rojo has redesigned. It all feels a lot cleaner and more compact (as well as slightly faster). Headline scanning’s improved quite a bit.

The one glaring mistake I’ve noticed is that headers no longer link to the original stories, but are some kind of permalink to the post inside Rojo. You have to click a link beside it, labelled “via [feed name]”. Silly choice!

links for 2006-02-16

Thinking about IxD patterns

Having just posted about a new pattern library; my mind has been occupied a bit by the role of patterns in design. I’ve noticed that for a lot of IxD problems, I tend to first try to tackle the issue myself. Then, I usually refer to some examples and / or patterns, to see if I’ve missed any obvious caveats. After that, I usually fine-tune the solution. What I like about patterns is that they give a clear outline of the most common way of handling a given problem. I do think that they’ll never be a replacement for some genuine inspired design – stuff that no one has come up with before. I doubt we’ll ever see the day when interaction designers will be replaced by a huge pattern library…

Yahoo! opens up some more

Some great new resources are now available, courtesy of everyone’s favorite web 2.0 company: Yahoo!

The Design Pattern Library contains a whole bunch of patters for user interface designers to use and abuse. Martijn van Welie finally has some competition.

Of more interest to developers is the UI Library, containing “a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications”. These code examples are frequently linked to from the pattern library.

I must say, these look like some excellent additions to the current body of knowledge available to designers and developers. Thanks a bunch Yahoo!

However, my paranoid mind can’t help but think: what’s the catch?

Via Jeremy Zawodny.