Designers... Give me the good oil!

So I'm one of the few fortunate developers around who actually sits right next to a bona fide designer! And not just any designer, but the revered Shanemo!

And whenever I'm working on a project, I always hit him up for advice, mainly because I like to cut code and tinker, but still care that the end user has a good experience. Shanemo knows what works, and how things should look and feel, but not get involved with the functionality I'm trying to deliver. I like to think of Shanemo's involvement akin to the sandwich expert at Subway... I call the shots on the fillings, but they know tomatoes go before ham, etc. 

Anyway, I've been working on a VE mashup using my secret squirrel CRM Live account (you're not going to get anything out of me!!!), and have decided to confine myself to using only the Windows Live SDK for this project.

Now, before I get into my designer woes, I just want to make a quick call on how I think the Web n.0 thing is going to play out, because there is a lot of talk going around about the distinction between platform and client. They way I see it is simple, there are going to be a bunch of big players that will provide most of the core, simple cloud platform services, such as data, search, services, and then there is going to be a tonne of smaller players leveraging those cloud platform services to build client software, but still in the cloud.

Onto my problem. Now, I'm not the first person in the world to have or be building a VE mashup, or any map mashup, but jeez, would it surprise you to find that there are no simple templates or starter kits out there that put the basic scaffolding in place to build one!? Not that I could find anyway. And I'm not talking about SDK samples, or ripping off someone else's CSS. I'm talking about a designer thought and built starter project, that I could simply kick-off with, and start adding my specific functionality.

Now this to me is key, mainly because I have the functional idea clear in my head, but don't have the time to get across all the peculiarities of CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, and on top of that, action models, UX guidelines, etc.

So I appealed to Shanemo. Why doesn't "the Design community" (you know who you are!), knowing that there are at least a few basic, well understood, Web n.0 application models out there (the biggest being the map mashup), put together some simple kick-start projects to get hoons like me up and running? I mean, I care about UX, it's just that I don't know much (but I can life heavy things!).

Anyway, please help us developers, we need love too you know (and UX assistance!).

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 18, 2007
  Is this that much different to what Popfly is 'aiming' at Dave?  ie: Build a site, build your Popfly mashup , add Popfly mashup to site.