Just returned from an eventful Pachyderm Project meeting in San Francisco. Much time was spent refining an unbelievable thorough requirements document (100+ pages) based on the last few months of creating user scenarios, culling those into requirements, sorting, prioritizing, and refining them towards the specs the programming team will use to produce the first Pachy 2.0 by October 2004 (we’re counting on seeing it!)
Bigger than that, those present got, for the first time, to create content with a copy of the Pachyderm 1.0 same as created by the SFMOMA team except this was running on a server D’Arcy has been nurturing up in Calgary, as documented in the first pachy product, perhaps what will be remembered in future years as the classic “spaghetti face” screen…
The 30 or so of us hammered away at the system for a few hours, struggling some with the interface and unfamiliar of the screen terminology, but in the end created brand new, non-SFMOMA pachyderm products. This was just playing around with a small assortment of images loaded into a test database, but proved the system, even at 1.0 would yield results.
I was not so fortunate, generating only VBScript errors on the publishing process- but others made some rather unique contributions. It was revealing that the process of authoring was somewhat counter-intuitive- most of us aimed for creating the front screens and working on down to detail from there, but the more productive work flow is actually starting from the more granular screen types, and working upwards to the more generalized ones- hey, it almost sounds like learning object theory. It highlights also what SFMOMA has done so well in doing a very detailed and well designed flowchart and storyboard on paper first– and how much this system lends itself to collaborative work since each piece is modular and separate.
Today we also got a demo of Macromedia Flex, a new “enterprise” product for what looks mainly like the e-commerce market– it is suppose to create complex web apps that avoid the client-server-client-server trafific of traditional http processing, e.g. all runs in one Flash instance.
Finally, we all walked out with a copy of the Pachyderm 1.0 server installation code on a CD- not to say I am willing to brave the horrific trail to getting it running (nor am I that thrilled to run an IIS server), and may just dabble off of the Calgarian host. But the Pachyderm made it in my suitcase:
Josh came up with the release code name… A group of Rhinos is a “crash” – for some reason, that seemed appropriate 😉