Week 9/10 Post

Last week was spent finishing off Google Docs from a DP point of view and this week was spent using Wink to image capture for all the design patterns to prove my claims.

This process took a lot longer than expected. Reasons being because the design patterns I've been using are from Schummer's book and there are 71 of them. In the initial stages of planning this project I did not expect to use so many. The positives of using many design patterns is that the tools covered are covered reasonably thoroughly. The negatives are that I won't be able to cover as many tools. By the end, I hope to have thoroughly covered between 4 and 6 tools. This may sound unrealistic, because of the time taken to cover Google Docs, but it was the most time-consuming because it was the first - I had to understand the design patterns and while applying them, had to make decisions to keep consistency. The other tools shouldn't take as long.

Next tool will be wikis. Then at least a non-web-based real-time writing tool and maybe a web-conferencing tool. If I have time, I will pick 2 others. I have tried to keep the tools quite different because the patterns I am using support many applications, so individual applications don't meet the requirements for all of the DPs - only a portion of them. Hopefully at the end, the tools covered, combined can support 90% of the patterns in some way or another.

I have already come across a few issues using the design patterns to describe tools. It is very difficult to keep consistency. For example, differentiating between a tool supporting a pattern, partially supporting or not supporting it. Some of the design patterns are borderline and it's difficult to decide what category the tool should fall into. I have included my assumptions for each design pattern to maximise consistency. At the end of the day, a lot of the judgements I'm making are my own, which isn't enough - it is likely that many people may disagree with some of my assumptions.

We'll see how it works out in the end...