Now as most of those of you who care know, I opted out of Shuttle a little while back, primarily due to too many on-going things in my ‘project-space’.
Well Khaled recently posted all the Shuttle mockups and has been talking a bit about it on his blog, which of course has triggered responses from interested parties through the WordPress-section of the so-called blogosphere.
I’ve personally not given it too much attention, having put myself in a ‘fall where they may’-attitude. And also I’ve had my head elsewhere these last days.
But that said, as Khaled also brings up in his latest entry, there are some people who are perhaps a bit negative towards Shuttle, and I thought I’d just touch on that with a bit of my insight.
First of all, I agree with Marco’s comment on that entry, in that Khaled perhaps made it seem a bit like something had been done, when indeed it hadn’t.
But what I’m actually more interested in touching on, is the state of the mockups themselves and how we landed there. Now the history of Shuttle too long to get into in detail, but in short it goes like this:
We get together, slam some mockups around, settle on the Write Page, work on it for a good long while, some of the elements make it into WordPress, though it makes it look a bit non-thought through. Fatigue kicks in, the write page is mocked up in a plugin (sorta like Tiger admin) to see how it works, we micro-manage for a while, move on to the login page (and other pages). Khaled does a major push and takes as much as he can from what we’ve all done and puts it into the set of mockups he’s posted online. Everyone else is flabbergasted at how he did it.
At this time I personally was tired of working on Shuttle, had a range of other projects lined up I was eager to work with and I decided to cut my weight from the project.
Had I stayed on though, I would have worked to implement some of our initial design aesthetics, which looked like this:
(I hope that answers this)
Shoulda, coulda, woulda. I don’t have the surplus energy or motivation to do that, and if Shuttle ends up being ‘just’ an implementation of some of our collective ideas, that in itself would be quite cool.
What WordPress needs is for two guys, one who is strong in design and one who is strong in code, each overlapping each other, to sit down and just get it done. Our primary mistake in the unbearable clearness of 20/20 hindsight was that we didn’t implement sooner.
A fantastic learning experience though, and it was great to be able to work alongside the likes of the guys involved, all of whom are mighty.
Well, can’t with them all. Hopefully we’ll get to see the fruit of our labor soon enough. At least we know it’s in the “right” hands and we can move on with other things.
I have to say I much prefer your post page mockup. The tab between presentation and code would be very useful (and something Khaled’s unfortunatly lacks).
Also, having a more aesthetically pleasing design would probably make me want to go back and write more :). A lot of Shuttle seems to be about attention to detail, and your details have the most attention!
They’re not mine, a very important distinction. They were the mockup we were all working on.
Ah, well it’s a shame it didn’t make it to the final :(.
I also prefer the mockups above. The screenshots Khaled posted look like they would be a great improvement in functionality, but they don’t have the kick-ass look of the login page above.
I much prefer your mockup of the login form over the one posted on the release of Shuttle and the current 2.0 login form. ‘m curious if the Shuttle project was started before 2.0 was released? Compared to 1.5, I much prefer Shuttle but compared to 2.0…
Initially I was going to hold back and not comment on this.
The ones you posted here I think are alot better than the “official” ones sent to Matt – especially the login screen, but I do really like your other mockup of the posting page too.
Top stuff to all involved though. :)
Unless the ideas behind Shuttle start to influence the WP core, I fear this will end up being nothing more than a new set of clothes for the administration panel. Don’t get me wrong, the fresh design is awesome, but WP has to back it up with some new and efficient code for the admin side.
I agree with your short, but important remark: “What WordPress needs is for two guys, one who is strong in design and one who is strong in code, each overlapping each other, to sit down and just get it done.”
I think there are a lot of projects like this, where if 2 people got together and just worked through a project – one artsy type/one geeky developer type. Unfortunately, it’s often tough for one to find the other.
For instance, I am a geeky developer with limited, but capable css skills. Just enough to get myself into trouble thinking I can do it all. I can’t find designers to help me out on projects. They’re off in design space with other designers.
What would be great would be a better way to connect these two groups together, in small teams, to quickly fire off projects and ideas. Get the design in there before a bad ui is formed by the developer, and let the developer help shape the design based on what is possible in code.
Do you need a css programmer or a javascript one?
i like this much much better
Hi Michael,
Nice read. I fully agree with your statement that WP just needs a kick ass design guy and a kick ass CSS guy. Being involved in CSS/Design projects myself I believe a combo of these two highly motivated people could result in a rather swift implementation of a much better admin interface for WP. I can see how most talented people are too busy to bring some serious speed in this process but on the other hand: Even though Open Source work doesn’t payback in money it WILL in terms of exposure and an enormous amount of potential client work. I myself get mailed at least once a week by people who want to hire me for either design stuff or AJAX stuff while ‘all’ I did is create some themes. And I don’t even consider myself nearly as talented as you, Khaled or Bryan. I’m quite sure you get even more mails like that, being the creator of K2 and all ;)
Imagine what would happen when your name is on the WP admin panel looking slick as hell.
Given this fantastic opportunity I’m somewhat surprised that people haven’t yet stepped up the plate to implement it as soon as humanly possible. I myself remember having loads of time to do such things when I was still in college. Too bad those days are over…
On a final note: I agree with some of the other commenters that the old screenshots you posted look MUCH spiffier than the final ones. The final ones definitely look great but these ones look ‘kick ass’ in my book. What caused the team to decide to tone down the slickness in the overall look of Shuttle? I’m interested in hearing about that!
So what happens now?