Hybridizing My App Design Approach
Interesting to see how Ryan Singer of 37 signals approaches app design from the perspective of UI. Granted, he's mostly a UI designer, not a back-end programmer (in fact, he specifies where in the process he hands it off)... but, this is still oddly similar to how I worked several years ago before we started trying TDD/BDD. Of course, I was also more the UI guy between the two of us.
Recently, I've put UI off until after writing a lot of tests on the model. And after that is exactly were I feel stuck.... lost on trying to envision Cucumber features before being able to see anything tangible. My brain _does not like_. Now, I think I'm going to try and merge the two approaches... rough-sketch basic model relationships, wireframe really raw UI, translate that into simple HTML templates, THEN start spec'ing the models... then describe the sketches in Cucumber features and finally start implementing code. That makes way more sense to me. I feel like I really need those steps of sketching wire-frames and getting a static version in the browser before I can fully envision the integration tests.
The momentum feels better so far. I firmed up about 12 wireframes today (the bulk of my app's non-admin side) and should have html templates built by tomorrow. And it's hella more fun this way. I mentioned how much I like the Draft app for iPad, right? :) (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/draft/id375570329)
