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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...
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
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.
It's the entire 'fuck non-technical users" attitude that spews forth from highly technical users that has hurt nix distributions hard.
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!
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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."
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.