Comments on Designers and Developers working together

I turned on "comment approval" a while back and used to get e-mails
telling me comments were waiting.  Apparently my Spam filter was
eating them, so I apologize to Daniel who posted several notes, in
particular this one:

John, Mano seems quite bullish on the notion of designers and developers seamlessly interoperating... People I've discussed it with are skeptical - we've been promised
the same with visual interdev, asp.net, etc. but it has fallen down in
real-world practice on big systems. What are your thoughts about making this work in the "real world"
-- i.e. without world-class designers like Mano who grok the technology
AND have the design chops. Will I be able to allow your average graphic
designer/artist type who's never seen a line of C# check in to my
source tree? Thanks for your great demo and for what looks to be a sweet product. Cheers - Daniel

I've heard this criticism before and it is completely valid.  I
don't think we're doing a lot different as far as just splitting up the
design from the code than ASP.NET etc. have done.  In Avalon we do
have a platform that was developed from the start with designers and
tools in mind, so I think we have some advantages over HTML with its
mongrel origins in the mind of Tim B-L and the browser warriors. 
But I think the real point we're trying to make is that this sort of
workflow has never been possible for "desktop" applications
before.  This is part of the "best of the web" (hopefully made
somewhat better) applied back to the "best of Windows".

We have tested Sparkle with non-Mano designers.  The early results
are mixed but promising.  I'll write soon about the
Model/View/ViewModel pattern our development team uses to try to
maximize our designers.

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 26, 2005
  John,
  
  Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Specifically re: "m/v/vm" idea - I'd be eager to hear more about it, but it sounds like the idea would be to abstract, not only the "model" classically understood, but also the view or application interaction state, as distinct from the presentation layer?
  
  Cheers - Daniel
• Anonymous
  September 28, 2005
  Daniel,
  
  Feel free to ask me more questions regarding the design/code separation on my blog if you'd like :) - I think I replied to your last question a few days ago.
  
  I know it sounds too good to be true ;) although as John pointed out this is not HTML and it integrates all native controls and primitives needed by designers to define the view to hook to the code/model. This allowed us to think about the tools WHILE the platform is being worked on and provide our feedback to ensure the best workflow possible.
  
  Take care
  
  -mano