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one day when I finally get around to ‘branding’ myself (or, more to the point, briefing someone competent to do it for me!), I’ll definitely need a favicon. In fact… maybe i need a temporary one now!
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Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. Tres cool.
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an intermediate-level book about interface and interaction design, structured as a pattern language. This site contains excerpts from some of the book’s patterns. The book has more, of course — more introductory material, more patterns, and more examples
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so we’ve talked about patterns quite a lot lately… now, via Wikipedia, I give you ‘antipatterns’. but, of course!
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Marc compares the ‘default images’ you find at Flickr, 43 Things and Last.FM and asks how the design of these icons might influence whether people replace them with their own images/avatars or not. Interesting.
Methinks you mean 23 May, no?
ah, yes.
whoops.
some kind of weird sub-concious ‘i can’t believe it’s almost June’ thing I think.
(for those who missed it, I’d dated the most 23 March)
Oooo, under Methodological Anti-patterns…
# Golden hammer: Assuming that a favorite solution is universally applicable
I suppose this is the danger with getting too involved with pattern libraries… Mind you, a workable pattern from a library could still be a good start, so customisation is targetted to the specific problem rather than built ground-up…
well… i’d have thought that if you have a good enough pattern library you might have a few different patterns to choose from, so determining the best solution is still part of the process (and that may involve developing a new pattern).
If you customise your patterns for every project, are they still patterns?
Hmmm… certainly some patterns may work straight from the box, so to speak. Perhaps the power of patterns is in the high-level stuff, and its the finely-grained areas or content that may need customising. I think they can still be patterns, in terms of “high-level objects” — let’s say a login-module. But customisation might be appropraite at the detail level (if the login-module is for a wedding register, say, would it be more appropriate to customise the language? eg “sign in” rather than “log in” — this is a fairly small and pathetic example, I know… ;)
I haven’t used a formal pattern library, per se. But there definitely are “modules” that I have created in Visio stencils, which I will use over and over again. (I do tweak, where necessary.)
M