Twitter is an -extremely- lightweight app. Look at it. Bootstrap provides a pretty layout, but think about interaction. You have a single form box to type into, and a bunch of links to follow. The updating content is the list of tweets, which is an ajax call to pop a new div into a container. I assume it updates the # of tweets, followers, and followings as well, though I've never watched that live. The extra links across the top load up more pages with the same layout with the same limited functionality. It's extremely lightweight and doesn't do anything to convince me. Maybe bootstrap can be used for more complex apps, but the twitter doesn't convince me. It's just CSS + a couple of components. On Nov 19, 2012, at 5:27 PM, Shiran Pasternak <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: jQueryUI and Bootstrap[1] serve different purposes in front-end design, and I think what Scott has in mind in creating a "graphic identity" aligns well with the abstraction level provided by Bootstrap. Bootstrap offers a way of consolidating and scaffolding CSS patterns across a site. It's akin to design patterns in programming. It's extensible and modifiable. jQueryUI defines a look-and-feel for interaction components, like animations and transitions. But the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I just think that the "graphic identity" of the interaction components will take many more iterations before we settle on it, while the static CSS-based look-and-feel is something more achievable. Shiran [1] BTW, Bootstrap is used by the Twitter web app, and — despite its shortcomings — is hardly a lightweight app. On Nov 19, 2012, at 5:46 PM, Paul Frybarger <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Just my two cents... I would have to agree with Neal in regards to Bootstrap vs JQuery UI. I've used them both to some extent, and for me, Bootstrap was easier to work with. While it may be simple, Bootstrap is a more complete solution over JQuery UI. It features layout (scaffolding) as well as UI components. The other big question which might play into which UI library we use, is if we want to try and incorporate an architecture library (MVC, MVVM, etc). The one that comes to mind is Backbone.js<http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/>, although Cappuccino can be regarded as MVC. I'm not saying that I think this is a good idea, just that I've heard discussion on this matter. I don't have a large objection against JQuery UI, but it would be nice to discuss the options a little more. On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 3:40 PM, Thomason, James <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I'm opposed to bootstrap because it's too simplistic. We're not building a web page, or even a web site. We're building a web app. Subtly different. So while bootstrap may be sufficient for layouts or lightweight apps, I think it breaks down the more complicated you make a site. JQueryUI doesn't seem to be as limited, so I think it'll scale better to our needs. Plugins look much better and robust in JQueryUI, for instance. Layout we can handle with CSS. I want something to let us easily build widgets and other components to plunk into pages and re-use everywhere. There are still dev headaches, mind you - embedding complex UI into a query plugin sucks, to put it mildly. But I think it's the best widely supported solution. To veer into the hypothetical, if you want the best, not-widely supported solution, though, I'd strongly lobby in favor of cappuccino (http://cappuccino.org<http://cappuccino.org/>), which is an incredible environment. It's basically an implementation of Apple's Cocoa framework in javascript. For building apps, it's amazing. You can lay out your UI in interface builder (well, Xcode now), use basically all of the bells and whistles that modern cocoa development has. It'd be very straightforward to port back and forth from a native mac app to a cappuccino implementation. That said, it takes a similar language approach and all coding is done in Objective-J instead of Javascript (which layers on top of the language the same way that Objective-C layers on top of C). Unless you're a iOS/OSX developer, there'd be a fairly big learning curve. While I'd love to use it, I also don't want to lock myself into being the only developer on the project writing for the chosen framework. So backing off from my ideal of cappuccino, JQueryUI looked like the best bet. On Nov 19, 2012, at 3:27 PM, Neal Conrad <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>> wrote: My thoughts about frameworks: If you compare Bootstrap and jQuery UI, I prefer Bootstrap because it seems to focus more on layout and has a modern, simplistic feel to it, more along the philosophies of 37 Signals. I think a framework that encourages simplicity in design and functionality is important. Of course, there may be better options out there besides Bootstrap or jQuery UI. Neal On Nov 19, 2012, at 3:19 PM, Christopher Henry wrote: I don't really think it's "early". Shouldn't this have been the first thing we did? I understand that the UI team isn't planning to produce anything for the February demo, but that doesn't mean we won't have a UI by the demo. We've had to bootstrap up temporary UIs ourselves, because we do need to have a UI at the demo, and a lot of people are going to see that UI. Like it or not, that's going to set the look and feel of KBase to a certain extent… Lots of users are going to see and start using the demo system. This is one reason why I really wanted to encourage UI people to try and produce *something* by the demo even if it's not the final product… not sure if that's in the plan at the moment. If there's some way we can come to some decisions now to frame and standardize the look and feel of our UIs…. that will help the KBase demo have a common look and feel, and it will prevent us from completely jarring our fledgling user community with the first UI team prototypes start to emerge. -Chris On Nov 19, 2012, at 3:04 PM, Annette Greiner <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>> wrote: The UI team has not been planning on going to the build, because we were told that the work was going to focus on code development and we should let the developers do that work. If there were discussion of the look and feel of the site, we would of course want to be involved. It's a little early to worry about the graphics (the look) for the narrative UI, though we could certainly start thinking about it. The UI design team has been focusing on the interaction design (the feel) thus far. For the look, we are recommending JQuery smoothness as a temporary, neutral theme so that we can show and test the feel without influence from the look. I would recommend that KBase use a professional graphic designer for developing the final graphic identity. Maybe someone with purse strings--Adam?--can clarify what the plan is in that regard. -Annette On Nov 19, 2012, at 12:04 PM, Thomason, James wrote: At least some of that stuff is already going ahead, or is being worked on in sub-groups already. I've been building the narrative in JqueryUI, for example. The UIx team is defining a lot more of the look-and-feel side of things (e.g., the recommendation is to use the smoothness jqueryui theme). They're also gathering feedback from the users and are planning on getting more, as I get useable stuff churned out. So a lot of the look-and-feel will end up evolving over time. For a CSS doc, if we don't end up using a standard jqui theme, then a custom one through there will define most of the styles anyway. At the moment, at least, if you're building in jqueryui and using the smoothness theme, then you're close to the overall look and feel of where the narrative is. I'm not opposed to a side-table, but it might end up being more of a show-and-share from the UI subgroups than a free-for-all to define stuff. Or maybe there's lots of stuff that can be defined. I can say that I'm very strongly in favor of jqueryui, but don't really care what fonts or colors we end up with, for example. On Nov 19, 2012, at 1:50 PM, Scott Devoid <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>><mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>> wrote: There was discussion during today's microbe's call about holding a brief side-table during the build week to go over the web-UI look and feel. The goal of this side-table would be to define an initial "graphic identity" for the KBase web UI. At the very least this would include choice of fonts, color palette, use of the logo. Hopefully we can also come to agreement on a basic UI look (e.g. Twitter Bootstrap or jQuery UI) and then codify things in a standard CSS document. This shouldn't take more than an hour. Does this sound like a good idea? Who would be interested in participating (particularly those who are not coming to Chicago for the build week)? Example of basic graphic identity statements: http://identity.uchicago.edu/ http://mit.edu/graphicidentity/ http://www.identity.ucla.edu/ ~ Scott _______________________________________________ Kbase-ui mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> https://lists.kbase.us/mailman/listinfo/kbase-ui -- -Jim Thomason... Scientific Informatics Developer @ The Ware Lab, a USDA-ARS Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory http://www.warelab.org/ http://www.cshl.edu/ _______________________________________________ Kbase-ui mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> https://lists.kbase.us/mailman/listinfo/kbase-ui -- Annette Greiner Outreach, Software, and Programming Group NERSC, LBNL [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 510-495-2935<tel:510-495-2935> _______________________________________________ Kbase-devel mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> https://lists.kbase.us/mailman/listinfo/kbase-devel _______________________________________________ Kbase-devel mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> https://lists.kbase.us/mailman/listinfo/kbase-devel _______________________________________________ Kbase-ui mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> https://lists.kbase.us/mailman/listinfo/kbase-ui -- -Jim Thomason... Scientific Informatics Developer @ The Ware Lab, a USDA-ARS Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory http://www.warelab.org/ http://www.cshl.edu/ _______________________________________________ Microbe mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> https://lists.kbase.us/mailman/listinfo/microbe _______________________________________________ Kbase-ui mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> https://lists.kbase.us/mailman/listinfo/kbase-ui -- -Jim Thomason... Scientific Informatics Developer @ The Ware Lab, a USDA-ARS Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory http://www.warelab.org/ http://www.cshl.edu/