launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Huw Wilkins <huw.wilkins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 24/11/11 23:26, Ian Booth wrote:
> Hi Huw
>
>> In my experience these rules usually apply:
>>
>> Do as little as you can. Spend the absolute minimum time on it.
>> Do just enough (technical work) so that changes can easily be made (this
>> is usually just a way of including reusable elements).
>> Everything should be a hack.
>> Code badly.
>> Don't reuse any of this work. If you're thinking of re-using it your
>> prototypes are probably WAY too high fidelity and your code is too good.
>> Don't worry about your usual technology stack. Static images, HTML and a
>> little JavaScript (not necessarily your usual framework) are your friend.
>> It'll be tempting to make a few extra things work. Don't do it. Seriously.
>> MUST be easy to deploy/share. Sometimes to test we'll need users to
>> download and look at things, sometimes they'll be able to look at a link
>> on the web.
>> Don't worry about making the design perfect, do just enough that the
>> meaning is clear.
>> If you need a database/web framework etc. you're probably doing too much.
>>
> <snip>
>
> All very excellent points and well said.
>
>> Ian, I realise some of these things disagree with with some of the goals
>> you were hoping for, but hopefully my experience will help a little bit.
>>
>> The prototypes for the manage disclosure pages are amazing, really well
>> done, but I kind of suspect that we could satisfactorily test those
>> pages with half or even less of the interaction they're currently
>> capable of. If all our prototypes were going to be that high fidelity
>> then yes, I can see why things like data persistence etc. would be useful.
>>
> You would be surprised how much the managing disclosure prototypes fit
> in with the points you make above. Until a day or two ago, there was one
> static html file and a huge blob of javascript to make the various pages
> hang together. There was a small amount of initial effort to set up some
> images/icons and other artefacts like launchpad.js containing our yui
> widgets, but essentially all the rules you mentioned were followed :-)
> The only things I did to add some structure were to make it easier to
> tweak things as feedback came in. The mock ups may have looked good from
> the outside, but I would be ashamed to show the code to someone else,
> and that to me is one metric which accurately reflects if one has done
> "too much" engineering on it :-) The only other person who saw it was
> Jon who also worked on it.

Fantastic!

>
> Where I was going with my initial post was wanting to make doing the
> prototype easier by using bits of LP infrastructure not available when
> using just Javascript and static HTML. All the principals outlined above
> would be adhered to, but the effort in doing the prototype would be
> reduced because of the availability of bits of infrastructure which
> would not have to be otherwise hacked together. I think using HTML5
> local storage and mustache will be useful tools to help achieve these goals.

HTML5 local storage and mustache are the kind of tools I would have
chosen (I have actually used HTML5 local storage for a prototype in the
past). I think both of them are easily hackable and little configuration.

Cheers,

Huw