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Independent Human Interface Guidelines
An anonymous reader alerts us to the IndieHIG Wiki, which is an independent effort to pick up the ball that Apple has dropped on human interface guidelines (can you spell FTFF?). From the wiki: "The IndieHIG project is an initiative created out of the necessity to document the new look and feel aspects of the Mac OS X experience, outside of the supervision of Apple itself. The project is not intended to replace, but rather to supplement the somewhat dated Apple Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). There are many instances of Apple using new and experimental interface styles, spurring developers to emulate these styles in their own applications. Unfortunately, because Apple provides neither guidelines nor code for developers to work with, the implementation of these interface styles and features by third parties can be lopsided and directionless. The IndieHIG intends to change this by providing a comprehensive set of guidelines governing the use and appearance of new, undocumented interface elements so that their implementation by third party developers adheres to the unwritten standards that Apple has set."
As in the auto industry, placement of standard controls in the user interface make everyone comfortable enough with the technology to promote universal usage. How they connect, their feel etc. leaves everyone a bit of leeway to play with the design, but there are those first moments when you immerse yourself into a technology where you neither want nor need to think about how to begin. The initial controls should be familiar to all.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Why would they let the Human Interface Guidelines langush? The consistency of the experience in using a Mac is a big plus. But, given the number of inconsistencies that have crept into OSX the past few versions, it's completely obvious to see it hasn't been a priority to them.
Guess someone has to pickup where Apple leaves off, it's just too bad that Apple is so set in not continuing all those years of solid UI studies they funded and documented themselves.
Human Interface Guidelines have been languishing for far too long at Apple (basically since OS 9 if not a little before).
This is sorely needed for the OS X platform, and Microsoft, all of the Linux Manager projects and the web as a whole could stand to take a few notes.
I'm not saying that this site is not needed in the UI community at large, but it seriously needs some work and input from designers. Probably the most useful entry is the "UI Elements to Avoid". Unfortunately, their number 1 avoidance is to avoid "Brushed Metal". However, the majority of their examples throughout the wiki make use of the Brushed Metal theme in all of their positive examples.
Can anyone explain how both KDE and Gnome have been working for years with the entire open source development world supporting them and they can't make anything even remotely close to the polish and UI level of this:
e xdesktop20060807.jpg
http://images.apple.com/macosx/leopard/images/ind
Do the toolkits just suck that much?
Do the developers just suck that much?
Shit brown desktop colours.
Jarring font alignments, positioning, and rendering.
Amateurish UI element spacing and layouts.
And the first person to say the worlds 'pretty' or 'skin' gets a beating...
and it wants it troll back.
This is pretty interesting. I think that developers could use this as guidelines for developing UIs for other platforms.
If the rumors are true, new unified interface standards will be debuted with Leopard. I think we may well see major developments on that front. There's a new unified grey theme that is going to replace Metal. Resolution independence is another big item, and we know that's coming. Hopefully Leopard will be the release to fix most, if not all, of the minor UI inconsistencies found in Apple's applications, which will in turn spur developers to follow suit.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
and it wants it's joke back.
When you start applying them as though they were cold, autistic rules, you start degrading usability. Emerson said it better than I ever could, but I will say this: Judicious use of dissimilar UI paradigms can emphasize the aspects of your application that are dissimilar to others, the aspects that need special attention from the user. Not everything should be treated the same.
That said, there are plenty of amazingly talented programmers who turn out to be rather shitty UI designers. While guidelines like the Mac OS X HIG are most useful in the hands of designers who already know what they're doing, I suppose as a cheat sheet for coders who have nowhere else to seek advice, they're better than nothing.
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
Isn't the major point of an good gui is consistency. What may be called languishing here could be just as easily interpreted as not reinventing the wheel. Anyways, Apple is putting more research into developing human interface guidelines for embedded OSX and small touch-devices like the iPhone.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Your expectation is that more cooks will help the broth. It's only because of that expectation that you're confused.
Are you adequate?
Either you have horribly abused that Mac and its software configuration, or you are lying. Actually, I think both are probably true. You are probably one of the few Mac users who has managed to install a virus, or else your hard drive is hours away from dying completely.
Also, your comment serves no purpose because it is so obvious that your problems are atypical. If you were to comment on common problems, preferable design flaws, then you would be on topic. I encourage you to elaborate on some of the other problems you claim to have had, so that we can have a productive discussion about a real problem.
how do i got virus?
It's the entire 'fuck non-technical users" attitude that spews forth from highly technical users that has hurt nix distributions hard.
John Surowiecki wrote "The Wisdom of Groups" because they are often smarter than any one individual member. However show a group how to go wrong and it will.
There is also the danger of groupthink where a group will behave in an idiotic fashion just beacuse it can. Think of any stock market bubble and crash.
(Agh! Had qny up there instead of qnx, I mean any)
fsck the fscking fsck?
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
yhbt yhl hand
> There is also the danger of groupthink where a group will behave in an idiotic fashion just beacuse it can
Oh, like say for example...naming everything related to your desktop with a K...and wondering why the grownups in the rest of the computing world don't take you seriously...
This will not work. For guidelines to get to a consistency there has to be someone in charge, able to put the boot down and say "now we do THIS, because THIS is how good it gets with what we can do today".
Sorry to be pessimistic, but in design there are too many different voices and opinions that want to be final. Locke returns, Tom dies, and Charlie sacrifices himself to save his friends. I have tried the wiki approach on a few projects before, but it all came down to first getting a consensus off the site to later update the wiki when something had been decided.
I'm so happy a group of enthusiasts has come together to make sure everyone thinking of making programs will put form before function. One time I was thinking about putting five buttons on a mouse, but then the Human Interface Guideline Coalition shut me down and informed me that humans sometimes have all of their fingers on one hand mashed into a pulp with a hammer and burnt with cigarettes so they can only effectively use one button. I can tell you I never made THAT mistake again!
IOU one (1) signature
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Bitches don't know about my spyware.
Actually it's cool to see someone cares. I think I saw one in a museum once.
Mod parent up, I really getting tired of that "multicolored pinwheel of wait".
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
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Microsoft has had design and UI guidelines out forever. An awful lot of 'developers' do not know, or fail to heed..but they've been out there.
Yeah, they've been on display in the bottom of a locked file cabinet in a disused lavatory in the unlit sub-basement of an abandoned garden shed on the outskirts of the Redmond campus for years!
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You need to get this thing called "Windows".
The thing that bugs me about both Mac OS X's Aqua (and MS Windows) is how the window manager seems to have so little authority over the windows it manages.
On SGI IRIX's 4Dwm, for example, if I use the window manager to minimise a window (by clicking on the minimise button, for example), it damn well minimises, no matter what state the window's application is in.
Why is Aqua's (and MS Windows's) window manager such a wimp? They have no authority over their windows at all. What kind of manager is that?
Max.
the GP is an old troll - don't bother with them
...they're patented?
Look, if you buy and use commercial software, you should live with what the vendor gives you, and you really don't have much choice. Trying to do some of their work for them doesn't make much sense.
Keep in mind that the primary purpose of any commercial piece of software is not to make users happy, it's to generate revenue. Sometimes those coincide, sometimes, they don't. For example, the Dock is an awful piece of software, but it demos well, so Apple keeps it. I suspect that the Finder and Spotlight also look nice in the store, even if they are suboptimal for actual use.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of Vista Ultimate(a P4 w/2 gigs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my G3 Powerbook running OS9, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that. In addition, during this file transfer, Internet Explorer will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even lynx is straining to keep up as I type this. I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Windows versions, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Windows OS that has run faster than its Mac counterpart, despite Intel's faster chip architecture. My Quadra with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 3 GHz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Vista is a superior OS. Vista addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Vista over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
+1 fashionably cynical
http://platial.com/system everything
or naming everything beginning with G,
or naming everything beginning with Windows,
or naming everything beginning with MicrosoftDoes not compute.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
while it has a nice GUI, it seems that buttons on toolbars are thought to be uncool. So you spend most of your time either doing things via menus (the hard way) or via the keyboard. The latter sort of defeats the whole point of a GUI. Toolbars are there for function, not for show. Of course Vista is just as bad these days. It looks like a button but when you click on it a menu pops up. IE7 looks sooo confused.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
At the bottom of the
Because NeXTstep didn't have to load the OpenStep libraries, Java was hard to come by and Mac compatibility was in a separate program / process _if_ one loaded ARDI's Executor and one didn't get transparency effects, the system also wasn't as effectively multi-threaded as Mac OS X is (granularity of Display PostScript was one PS operator --- which was bad for any apps when that one operator was displaying a multi-megabyte TIFF on-screen) &c.
Try OPENSTEP 4.2 for a closer comparison --- just loading the OpenStep libraries (in addition to the NeXTstep ones) can be enough to push a well-performing system into swapland.
I agree with your thesis, but performance improvements have been steady since the Mac OS X public beta, the system does a lot more and one can always upgrade hardware (though I still have and use a NeXT Cube on my desk at home). Hopefully GNUstep will address some of this, but one still needs replacements for apps like Lotus Improv, Altsys Virtuoso and TIFFany.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Unless you don't charge and use it in evil manners, I doubt Apple will care about patents they own. It is about the will of people using something.
I know by experience. How many Aqua-like themes on GPL/BSD Window Managers/Browsers out there? They just told not to use "Aqua" word as far as I remember.
Now try this, ship a spyware which you also charge money which claims to show OS X themed Windows. Count days if not hours you will get a letter from Apple lawyers.
Until there's a # button on the keyboard. Now that's usability.
I'd like to think that the past seven years have been all about experimentation for Apple. When they binned OS 9, they also dumped the concordant HIG - and rightfully so. How we interact with computers should - no, must - evolve as computer literacy becomes ingrained in the culture. Just as we understand moving pictures rather better than the audiences of 1904 - we understand the evolved grammar of cinema - e.g., what do close-ups mean, how point-of-view is established and played with in a scene. And surely Edwardians would have seizures from the editing in Michael Bay movies?
We understand these things, so at some point people will just 'get' that a computer stores information in hierarchical files and folders and moving pictures around have some relationship to spatial distances in the real world.
So what comes next? How will we conceive of interacting with these boxes to do our work (and what will our work be)?
I'd fault Apple not for experimenting with a multiplicity of UI ideas, but for taking so bloody long to come up with the Next Big Interface Paradigm ;-) They're clearly seeing what works and what doesn't in the marketplace, but it is taking quite the long while to get to a stable milestone UI upon which to base further work and research.
You're being critical about UI design but using terms that you can't define, saying they are appropriate and citing an American novel for the obscure usage. Being 2-for-2 in name-dropping strongly supports your literary reputation at the water cooler but brings me no further in understanding what the devil you are saying. I suspect that you've put a regal costume on a fully banal observation and you've evidently dazzled our Moderators.
"Judicious use of dissimilar UI paradigms can emphasize the aspects of your application that are dissimilar to others, the aspects that need special attention from the user."
I sure hope Emerson said that first sentence better, unless you meant "Emerson, New Jersey", in which case I will have to take your word on it.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Don't Feed The Trolls! IOW laugh, it was meant to be funny...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I've submitted an idea to Apple before, suggesting that windows be resizable along any edge by pressing a modifier key as you click on the edge. Never had a response, and obviously it was never implemented. NIH is still an issue at Apple, though less so than the past, and curiously the reduction in NIH coincides with rising inconsistency in the MacOS X UI.
Perscriptio in manibus tabellariorum est.
But that's not like I am endorsing it. Gnome is too restrictive - even more than OS X, in ways it shouldn't be. KDE is better, but compared to OS X it is just... ugly. Really hard to translate in words, and I highly doubt if HIGs are the answer. I guess it is harder to convince talented designers to open source their efforts than to convince talented programmers.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
The latest version of Gaim (called Pidgin) fits in really well on my Windows XP system. It looks right, whichever theme you're using.
Perhaps you're using an older version of the GTK library. Pidgin relies on GTK for theme support, so it's important you have the right version of that. (You would expect that newer versions have fewer bugs and better theme support.)
Try re-installing the latest version, and be sure to download the recommended version (pidgin.exe) rather than the lightweight version (pidgin-nogtk.exe).
Very good points, however instead of moving the menu to all Windows I prefer the Amiga MagicMenu way.
In AmigaOS the menu was always at the top of the screen and only showed when you right clicked and you selected something by raising the right mouse button, BUT with MagicMenu you also got the whole menu as a right click popup menu where you hade your mouse pointer, so if you are at the wrong screen just right click anywhere in the application window and there you have your menu as a popup menu seen in say afterstep, windowmaker or whatever. Very convenient and it doesn't use any space at all.
Oh Christ, I said I understood "cold, autistic" to fit in this context, specifically of UIs presenting themselves as numbing, alien landscapes to the user because some pale lifeless thing in a cave somewhere took the HIG a little too literally. You're right to criticize my awkward sentence construction, I'll admit—but you try talking poetry to this crowd.
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
I'd mod you up for the "pale, lifeless thing in a cave" metaphor. And the abbreviation, "PLTIAC", is amusing too!
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I dunno what weed you are smoking, but I've run Windows and OS X on the same machine(s), and OS X is much, much faster than Windows at just about everything. With the exception of Finder lockups to do with network access (which, BTW, plagues Explorer a bit too!), it's very snappy.
This is on a Dell Dimension 4600, with 1.5G of RAM, and OS X feels just like it does on a brand new iMac. Windows is more than sluggish on this machine. Not to mention unstable.
Hell, the only reason I go back into Windows is to play Eve Online, since it won't run under Parallels.