UI patterns

So I've come back quasi-full circle, finding myself thinking of Wx-enabled smart widgets based on the wftk (seriously, it's like it's 2002 again), and last night after the laptop was off, I scribbled down the following note:

Basic mail UI against repo. Define mail-like queues as a thing.

The first sentence is a UI pattern (basic mail reader, with groups, then messages, then a document view for the mail itself), and the second is the data pattern it presents to the user (the concept of a message queue, possibly with threads, certainly with some kind of topic grouping).

This kind of pattern-based "architectural" programming could and should be carried down to the lowest possible levels of programming. That's a semantic mode of conceptualizing software.

Anyway, so I looked up "UI patterns", thinking that would get me that Yahoo effort (YUI, already noted elsewhere on this blog) - but instead it turned up UI-patterns.com, a short-lived effort by Danish web developer Anders Toxboe, an attempt to develop a UI pattern gallery/database/article focus site that seems to have gone on for 2010 and 2011 and stopped. Plenty of spam in the comments sections, but otherwise a ghost town.  Too bad, because it's pretty much what I'd like to start from in this attempt to come up with a language of UI pattern design.

Some good grist for the mill, anyway.

Filed under UI design, patterns, and architectural patterns, because I suspect the UI design has to be based on some conceptualization of the data that would be reflected in the system architecture.