The reaction to the recently launched Yahoo! Pattern Library and the UI Code Library has been amazing.

When we (Matt Leacock, Chanel Wheeler and myself) presented last year at the IA Summit we were asked by a lot of people if we would take the library public. Of course, back then we were just trying to get it up and running and didn't even know if it was a good idea to roll out. When we wrote the article on B & A we didn't really go into the patterns themselves. So it's great to finally be able to share.

The library is the work of quite a few people: Matt Leacock, myself, Kiersten Lammerding, Lance Nishihira, Chanel Wheeler, Sanjing Bai, Annette Leong, Ruby Hong, Leslie Wang, Rob Aseron, John Boyd, Bill Scott and a host of other interaction and visual designers and their team across the company. I want to thank my amazing team for all their hard work and for the community for so openly accepting it.

So today we took a huge step to contributing to the collective knowledge base and released to the public (with Creative Commons license) our very own Pattern Library and UI Interface Code Library.

We have worked really hard to take our internal patterns that have reached a certain level of maturity and rolled them out to the public. We are hoping to release something monthly and over time we hope that a majority also have associated code to go along with them.

This has been an exciting project to work on and I hope that folks out there can make use of the work.

Links and info:

Yahoo! Design Pattern Library
Since 2004, Yahoo! has been collecting and cataloging interaction design patterns in our internal Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. We have presented about it at conferences and in articles. But now we have opened it up for the public. This first release is small (just 13 patterns) but we will be adding to it over the next few months to round out the offerings in there.

It is located at: http://developer.yahoo.net/ypatterns/index.php

Yahoo! User Interface Library
Since early in 2005, Yahoo! has been developing its own Ajax/DHTML framework. Core requirements for this library included excellent browser compatibility, industrial strength scalability and good documentation. The library is now available on the Yahoo! Developer Network under the BSD license! Its got all of the things you would expect (drag and drop, animation, event management, widgets, etc.)

http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/index.html

Notice we have rolled these two libraries out together. Today there is a small amount of synergy, but going forward we expect many of the design patterns to link directly to our code library for examples and help in implementing design solutions.

Yahoo! User Interface Blog
The http://yuiblog.com is where will be talking about user interface design and development with these two libraries.

I have decided to bring Design Writings back. Since I am no longer editing Boxes and Arrows, I thought I might occassionally have something to say. So here I am, back in the world and hope that folks find their way back.