photo by tifotter

I came across the Yahoo! Developer Network: Design Pattern Library recently and was impressed with the number of patterns they had. It has been out for a while now, but I am just now getting back to checking it out. Definitely a useful resource.

photo by texas_mustang

One of the things I like about taking a project from start to finish is the first few rounds of development where we hammer out what the application is supposed to do. After reading Kathy Sierra’s article “Don’t Make the Demo Look Done“, I wanted to see if I could come up with something similar to the Napkin Look and Feel for my web applications.

Why is it important? I have found out the hard way, what Joel Spolsky points out in The Iceberg Secret, Revealed. As soon I start putting the colors, graphics, and drop shadows in place for the finished product, the attention is no longer on the functionality of the application and now turns to “could you move that button over 5 pixels?” And this is still while half the application remains unfinished!

So this is my interpretation of making the demo look like a demo. It is completely driven with a separate CSS stylesheet that can be removed and replaced with the finished stylesheet. I make use of the Yahoo CSS and some paper background images. I have even contemplated making use of the Tongue In Cheek icons to make it even more authentic. I would have used a handwriting font, but there is not a good cross browser way to deliver fonts, so Comic Sans will have to satisfy the prototype font requirement.

Here are what the initial screens look like for a new application:

• Home Page
• Sample Page
• Sample Page

Does it work?

So far it has worked great. And as soon as we switch stylesheets, we lose focus on the functionality. Every time. So I will keep using this and keep pushing this as far as a project will let me.

Because my friend Matt was so impressed with a Firefox extension I showed him, I thought I would share some of my other favorites.

photo by longhorndave

What Extensions I Am Using Right Now

• Web Developer Toolbar - Just about everything you could want to do HTML and CSS, plus I can edit AND save the CSS changes I was playing around with.
• Firebug - So much goodness. Especially debugging JavaScript and looking over AJAX requests and responses.
• View Source Chart - Makes looking at HTML source bearable.
• ColorZilla - a color picker for pulling colors off of web pages.
• HTMLValidator - because it is too easy to miss a closing tag somewhere that messes everything up.
• DummyLipsum - when you need some filler content.
• SeleniumIDE - great little utility for helping to write Selenium tests for functional testing.

photo by meshmar2

Not to mention

• Adblock - no more ads.
• Adblock Filterset.G - no more ads just got easier.
• GTDInbox - for when I think that I am Getting Things Done
• Foxmarks - because I have too many computers and too many bookmarks.

Got a favorite? I’d like to hear about it.

photo by monique72

With all of the talk these days of Web 2.0 and the fancy, shiny, draggable, refreshable, blinking, glowing components in web applications, I wonder how many of the will still work when JavaScript is turn off or not even present (yes, it still happens). And how is the usability and accessibility of the application affected when so much of the interaction happens through JavaScript that doesn’t degrade?

I have been taking a look at creating a fully functional application, without any fancy Javascipt or AJAX, and then adding the extra functionality unobtrusively. To force myself to learn how to do this, I stopped using Prototype, script.aculo.us, and the Ruby on Rails helpers with RJS, and I started using JQuery. Two things happened: 1. I started to better understand how AJAX works and can enhance my application. 2. I found out I really like JQuery.

More on my JQuery experiences later. Now back to adding cool features, unobtrusively.

I wanted to mention a simple little tool that has saved me hours. The Yahoo! UI CSS Foundation is actually three separate CSS files: Reset, Fonts, and Grids.

Reset removes all of the default styling from the browser. Even with out add a stylesheet to you website, the browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari) has already add some default styles. This is why headers are bigger and bolder than text in a paragraph. But, amazingly enough, the default styles vary from browser to browser. Reset CSS is great because it removes all of the default styling and let me, the developer/designer, go and set the style that I want. I can be sure that some default style won’t creep in and ruin a good design.

Where Reset removes all of the default styling, the Fonts CSS sets a level playing field and uniform approach to font sizing. With the various ways to size fonts (px, pt, em, %), it shouldn’t be any suprise that once again the various web browser handle these differently. The Fonts CSS gives you a uniform way of setting the base size of the document and adjusting all other font sizes as a percentage of the base size. It turns out that, while requiring a little bit of math, this is super easy and keeps things looking good.

While I start every project with the Reset and Fonts CSS, it is the Grids CSS that really is the time saver. Now that using tables for layouts is so 1990’s, coming up with cross-browser compatable grid layouts can be a challenge. When you combine it with the decisions of fixed-width or fluid layouts, sidebar positioning on the left or the right, semantic markup, and search engine optimization, grid layouts can make you scream and run. The Grids CSS gives you three tools in one: fixed-width or fluid layouts, sidebar size and positioning, and grids. I won’t get into all the details, but you can play with the Yahoo! Grid Builder or check out some of my latest projects to see it in action.

To top it all off, there is one combined file that is compressed and includes all three CSS components. All you have to do is add a link tag pointing to the latest version and you are off and running. Now you can focus on more important things, like making your application functional.

It finally happened. McKinney Station got a blog! Right now there is not much here, but should be changing very soon. I have all sorts of articles in my head wanting, no, demanding to get out. Thoughts on web applications, Ruby, Rails, Java, xHTML, CSS, JavaScript and more.

Check back soon for my latest thoughts and ideas. Welcome to the Station, this train is about the leave.