April 05, 2007
Coherent Design Across Web Apps
Andy Rush of the UMW New Media Center has just released a consistent style/design across their WordPress blog and MediaWiki wiki:
The new site provides the user with a consistent and coherent style/form of navigation across the two apps.
With more and more apps allowing users to define their own skin/theme, the UMW new media site shows how - in principle - unified styling could be achieved across applications emebedded within a Stringle container.
This means I really need to: a) start identifying those stringle:tools (apps that work okay in an iframe ;-) that support user themes/styles/skins; and b) start thinking about a simple visual theme that will let me demo a proof of concept, coherent design stringle:profile.
At least two other pieces are required for a fully coherent stringle experience as well, though:
1) single sign on - OpenID may provide a way forward here?
2) interoperability between applications - so documents and content can be passed seemlessly from one app to another.
There are already glimpses of interoperability available, provide by the apps themselves - the ability to bookmark user created/customised pages on delicious for example (what I call 'roundtripping' in stringle - the ability to bookmark a a user created page in such a way that it becomes available in the stringle navigation widget), or the ability to open linked to office docs online using Zoho.
Posted by ajh59 at April 5, 2007 11:04 AM