Clearly, Yahoo! and Google competition is heating up. Each has their own online map applications (Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps), plus other free tools. Now Yahoo! has released some free tools for designers and developers. One is the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and the other is the Yahoo! User Interface Library.

Yahoo! Developer Network

The Yahoo! Developer Network recently launched, in my opinion, as a counter to Google's similar offerings. Just look at all these tools Google is offering.

Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

The Yahoo! Design Pattern Library is a library of common user interface solutions found on current Web sites, for example, "Breadcrumbs" is a design pattern to help users "navigate potentially large quantities of information efficiently, without becoming lost."

Listing design patterms like this is a great idea, and something I've wanted to do for some time, but never had the time. The whole idea comes from design patterns used in programming, which actually have nothing to do with page design, but with how to describe and resue common programming solutions, see Design pattern (computer science) on Wikipedia. Also, I believe this idea in programming actually came from architecture, see Design pattern (architecture) on Wikipedia.

Yahoo! User Interface Library

The Yahoo! User Interfafce Library is "a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, HTML and AJAX," including a Calendar and Drop and Drag scripts.