With the main brows­ing UI for a thou­sand words up and run­ning, it’s time to bore the world with more point­less trivia before mov­ing on. Today: design sketches!

Pretty much every soft­ware project I under­take these days begins with a sketch of the user inter­face and an ini­tial struc­ture for the data­base. Labour­ing under the cruel ‘no white­board’ con­di­tions at home (maybe I should get one?), I drew these out on paper. Pass­ing the UI sketch over to Eric after about 5 min­utes’ work, she described it as “awe­some”. I think that’s the first time that’s ever hap­pened; the gen­eral response at work is along the lines of “but where are you going to put giant-ugly-element-X that I’ve just thought of and wasn’t in the spec?”. So that was that, and I’ve coded it up pretty much as it was on paper.

The data­base hasn’t changed much from the orig­i­nal design yet, but it will have to soon — as designed, the vote (‘stars’) sys­tem doesn’t record each user’s vote on each story, so it can’t sup­port users chang­ing their vote. Some­time dur­ing devel­op­ment I’ll have to devote a few hours to fig­ure out the best way of han­dling it, though that prob­a­bly comes down to a few min­utes as some­one on Stack Over­flow has inevitably asked about it already.

UI Sketch

Data­base Design

Next up on a thou­sand words is cod­ing the first few forms that will allow users to reg­is­ter and log in, sub­mit pho­tos and sub­mit sto­ries. That should be done within the next few days, and will allow me to play with actu­ally chang­ing the con­tents of the data­base, rather than just show­ing views of it.