There are many books on UI design that are worth looking into, two of the more useful ones I have used:
GUI Bloopers The Design of Everyday Things
Also, the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (downloadable here: http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/mac/HIGuidelin es/HIGuidelines-2.html) is great for its sections on design principles like modelessness and user control. The Mac-specific stuff like where to put buttons is less relevant and can be skipped.
I'd recommend focusing on the principles of good design that can be used on Swing, Windows, Mac or KDE and Gnome. Good UI principles will still be valid 10 years from now, when neither XP or Aqua will be around anyway.
UI research is precisely the kind of thing Microsoft thought was a waste of money until a couple years ago. Apple did alot of the basic research on usability throughout the 80's and 90's. Microsoft did not. They have turned that around and are spending on research in a big way now, but to say that a UI is tested and usable simply because it is running under Windows is a bit of a stretch. Some Windows apps are great, but the Windows universe of apps sorely lacks consistency.
I remember being a kind in the early 70's and my dad bringing home cards from f'd up programs for some manufacturing company he worked for...They were freaking space-age stuff to me. Growing up on those warped me enough so now I have hobbies like "Collecting NeXT cubes"...
I personally only came to New York after I made sure there were enough dumpsters to sleep in, and the urinals had plenty of cigarette butts to smoke. After that, does anything even matter?
Mac OS X is not KDE. It's NeXT Step, an OS that has been refined since it's development in 1988. It is extremely good for development. Take a look at Apple's Project Builder.
I've noticed that both Jeff Raskin and Bruce Tognazzini have savaged OS X as a giant piece of garbage. But both seem more intent on arguing for features they had a hand in creating than in how the OS X UI has been designed. Raskin's comment the "that a computer should be as easy to use as to start typing on a keyboard to open a word processor" is just a reference to his ill-fated Canon CueCat (which is really how he wanted the Mac to turn out, he didn't even like the GUI). I've played with OS X , and found it highly hackable and extremely network savvy and usable . It seems that people like Raskin and Tog are still just smarting from working with the well-documented jerk Jobs, and not really commenting on the merits of OS X.
Re:OSX? BeOS is the answer!
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OS X on x86?
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Except that OS X is NeXT Step, which was around in 1989. There are still NeXT Step widgets in many of the installed apps on the OS X beta.
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There are many books on UI design that are worth looking into, two of the more useful ones I have used:
n es/HIGuidelines-2.html) is great for its sections on design principles like modelessness and user control. The Mac-specific stuff like where to put buttons is less relevant and can be skipped.
GUI Bloopers
The Design of Everyday Things
Also, the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (downloadable here: http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/mac/HIGuideli
I'd recommend focusing on the principles of good design that can be used on Swing, Windows, Mac or KDE and Gnome. Good UI principles will still be valid 10 years from now, when neither XP or Aqua will be around anyway.
UI research is precisely the kind of thing Microsoft thought was a waste of money until a couple years ago. Apple did alot of the basic research on usability throughout the 80's and 90's. Microsoft did not. They have turned that around and are spending on research in a big way now, but to say that a UI is tested and usable simply because it is running under Windows is a bit of a stretch. Some Windows apps are great, but the Windows universe of apps sorely lacks consistency.
I remember being a kind in the early 70's and my dad bringing home cards from f'd up programs for some manufacturing company he worked for...They were freaking space-age stuff to me. Growing up on those warped me enough so now I have hobbies like "Collecting NeXT cubes"...
OSX supports 3-button mice quite nicely.
OSX is OpenStep. The object-oriented nature of OpenStep and MacOSX come from Next, not BSD.
I personally only came to New York after I made sure there were enough dumpsters to sleep in, and the urinals had plenty of cigarette butts to smoke. After that, does anything even matter?
Mac OS X is not KDE. It's NeXT Step, an OS that has been refined since it's development in 1988. It is extremely good for development. Take a look at Apple's Project Builder.
I've noticed that both Jeff Raskin and Bruce Tognazzini have savaged OS X as a giant piece of garbage. But both seem more intent on arguing for features they had a hand in creating than in how the OS X UI has been designed. Raskin's comment the "that a computer should be as easy to use as to start typing on a keyboard to open a word processor" is just a reference to his ill-fated Canon CueCat (which is really how he wanted the Mac to turn out, he didn't even like the GUI). I've played with OS X , and found it highly hackable and extremely network savvy and usable . It seems that people like Raskin and Tog are still just smarting from working with the well-documented jerk Jobs, and not really commenting on the merits of OS X.
Except that OS X is NeXT Step, which was around in 1989. There are still NeXT Step widgets in many of the installed apps on the OS X beta.