[IxDA Discuss] Apple iTunes Flipbook Pattern

[Christian Crumlish]

This question comes up a lot in the realm of UI patterns. For good or
ill, interaction patterns have tended to be specified a little more
granularly (almost to the widget level sometimes) and a little less
philosophically than "Alexandrian" patterns.

The link between architectural patterns and interface patterns,
historically, is software design patterns (the Gang of Four, the
Hillside Group, the Portland Pattern Repository, et al.) and those
folks explicitly saw the fork in the road between the two approaches
and took it (to misquote Yogi Berra), distinguishing between
"descriptive" and "generative" patterns.

Fwiw, we're currently working on a "carousel" pattern for the Yahoo
pattern library (and, honestly, I wouldn't have associated it with a
wizard, but that's an interesting thought).

-xian-

> Not necessarily, but it depends on how you define the term, or what your
> pattern is being used for I suppose.
> Christopher Alexander's original architectural patterns were a template
> describing a common design solution to support a certain type of user
> activity (e.g. A place to wait).
>
> In terms of an interaction design pattern, it is probably "a way to browse
> or move sequentially through objects". Thus it has a high degree of
> similarity to a wizard (and a wizard is probably a subset of the above
> design pattern). However, it all depends on how you want to link
> higher-level abstract patterns with more specific ones.
>
> In any case, using a park bench or an Aeron chair doesn't really change the
> pattern of 'a place to wait', the purpose is still the same, but the
> implementation is different. I'd venture that the flipbook is a new Widget,
> but not a new Pattern.

>
> -Jeff
>