We’re excited to announce that Pattern Tap has finally been updated to a new style and way of working. It’s been a long time in the making and there have been a host of things I’ve learned along the way. As with any redesign you’re sure to disappoint some and thrill others, but I am hoping that what I’ve designed and what the Army of Bees guys have built, will stand...

This last week we launched what will be the basis of the future of Pattern Tap. It’s a responsive style design that conforms from wide screen down to mobile with care for a correct hierarchy along the way. We’re using media queries to accomplish this, and sometime after the break we’ll get our frontend dev, Michael Meyer, to let you know more about how this was achieved on the...

For the next version of PT, we’ll most likely be needing different thumbnail sizes to reflect the needs of the design. The current PT is written in PHP, but PT is going to be written in Ruby going forward (alpha.patterntap.com is already written in Rails), so I decided to take a gander as what’s out their for image manipulation in Ruby. For raw image manipulation, there is RMagick,...

Hello Pattern Tappers, Please forgive our brief hiatus. We’ve been tied up with other things, namely a small naming challenge with another quality Pattern Library application. That’s not all though! We’ve been working on pulling on our favorite information architect, usabilty freak, and web strategist @emilysmith into our Pattern Tap project in order to capture some good...

Just a quick note to let everybody know that we just enabled the ability to browse by collection or tag. You can check it out by clicking the Browse item in the main navigation bar. The list of collections and tags takes advantage of CSS3 columns, so make sure you’re using a recent version of Safari, Chrome or FireFox. :) Also, people are starting to give great feedback. Keep it...

We knew we’d be learning a lot in our first week after launching alpha.patterntap.com. Here’s a list of some of those things: We didn’t make it clear enough that the Alpha of Pattern Tap is an experiment and a show of in-progress work. From the get-go, we knew that Alpha Pattern Tap was going to be a showcase of us getting iterations out fast and responding fast. I think this...

Pattern Tap 2.0 is officially in Alpha stage. What does that mean? Everybody uses alpha and beta differently, so it probably could use a bit of defining in our case. For us, alpha means that we’re giving everyone an in-progress view of how Pattern Tap 2.0 is growing and how it has changed from Pattern Tap 1.0. We’re feeling very experimental about the whole project so things are probably buggy,...