or, The Three Little Pigs: Then and Now.
Chapter 1: Then
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away lived 3 little pigs in a wood. One pig was a graphics designer, the other was a program manager (business analyst, if you like) and the third was a developer. They all lived in harmony until new features came along. When that happened, it was usually the program manager (PGM) pig who started all the fuss.
The PGM pig took his primitive toy, or worse still - paper - and squiggled some lines and boxes and wrote up some lines, aligned them all and gave it to the graphics designer (UI) pig.
The UI pig dressed it up nice and fine - added the right colors, hue, gradient, font. He created a lovely looking picture out of it and sent it to the developer. And he would throw the squiggly
The third (DEV) pig looked at the picture and set to work. His job was to bring the picture to life, and get it to do something. Working on a blank canvas, he painstakingly tried to recreate the picture - each color and image and box and words. Days turned into nights, and then, finally the pig was done.
When the PGM pig saw it, he was huffing and puffing (and blowing the house down!) The buttons should be a little lower! There's too much whitespace on the right! I want all this in the same window! And other things that left the DEV pig scratching his chinny-chin chin.
Some more printouts.
Some more squiggles.
Some more hue, alignment.
Lots of throwing away. Paper, Beautiful old pictures. LoC*.
Some more vigorous hacking.
More scratching the hair on their chinny chin chins.
Vicious Cycle.
The next day, they were confronted by the Big Bad Wolf (the Project Manager) asking them to present their work on time or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house away!
More huffing and puffing.
More days turning into nights.
More throwing away.
More wishing this was all over.
Little did they know that their lives were about to change.
Chapter 2: Now
One day, the King of Far, Far Away decided "enough is enough. Lets put an end to the pigs' misery!" And so he did.He created a new way for the designer and developer pigs to talk to each other. Now, these two pigs each use their own toys (for the developer, for the designer) and each toy could talk to the other. No more pretty pictures thrown away. No more starting off from a blank canvas. You could change things completely before you said "Oink!".
And the two little pigs lived happily ever after.
"No, no! Wait for me!" cried the little PGM pig.
Huh?!
"But you don't know this language. All you know is English. Very good English, but its - just English!" Said the DEV pig. Take a look:
"C'mon, its almost English**!" said the PGM pig. "We could all finish up before the Big Bad Wolf came, and go home."<Button>Control.Background PE
<Control.Background>
<LinearGradientBrush StartPoint="0,0" EndPoint="1,1">
<GradientStop Color="Yellow" Offset="0.0" />
<GradientStop Color="LimeGreen" Offset="1.0" />
LinearGradientBrush>
Control.Background>
Button>
"I hate it when you are right - it usually means more work for me!" conceded the UI pig. "You really needn't know all of it, you know. Just the essentials."
"Sure, anything that means less work" said the PGM pig.
So the PGM learnt to use the new language -XAML - just the essentials. Soon he could make his own tweaks,** and use the designer's tool for all his squiggles.
And so, the three little pigs lived happily ever after.
The End.
*Lines of Code.
** Must read link.
p.s.:
XAML is a MS specific technology, used when the UI is written using WPF or Silverlight.
Wanted from MS now: A tool that functional analysts can use to capture business requirements and draw up screens.
6 comments:
@Sowmya,
hmm.. happily live ever after!!.
I don't know how many devs and designers actually used this tool.Would love to hear practical stories. I for one am trying hard to push this approach.
By the way interesting way of putting things.!! ;)
@Ram: first of all, good to see you here.
My Story:
We had a prospective client visit us from the US, and we had to make our best impression. So apart from the presentations, we put together a WPF demo with some proposed features -- all in a day, thanks to Expression Designer and Visual Studio talking XAML. It was a blessing to be able to share project files (including the code behind) with the designer whenever we needed to make some changes. It was a refreshing experience, all in all.
WPF, XAML, Expression are all new technologies, just at the beginning of their adoption cycle - the practical stories whether there is a happy ending or not should come in as these tools get adopted.
The concept is great, the intention is neat, and thats why people like us should try it out. This post is to evangelize that :). Spread the word.
I don't know are you asking a person like me to learn some coding language to express our thoughts? Or is there is a tool which will allow me to sketch some low fidelity wire frames and the XAML code is written behind? Something what Dream weaver did to html? May be I'm not getting it...
@Sowmya,
hmm good that you find it good to see me here ;).
I did a similar quick fire stuff today( myself being both designer and developer in this case ;) ). Lets see how it works out once my team starts using this.
@Umesh.
The best part is, you as a UI designer can put in what ever you want. The dev. need not come to the design and tinker it. He can stick to his code.(i haven't used dreamweaver, so can't compare)
An example I had today goes like this. After showing the demo to the client. He could open the project in Expression, change some styles,etc. without opening the code.
It would require some discipline on out part to achieve this with the earlier tools.
One way of looking at it is, it helps in enforcing discipline.
@Umesh: from what I have seen of Expression, you can go from lo-fi to hi-fi and write some working code with one project file. Given the way our teams are structured, that is a productivity improvement in itself.
My current project works exactly in this model, and the benefits are refreshing. Especially after having worked all these years trying to keep design and dev in sync through documents and screenshots!
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