Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Sunday, September 8, 2002
02:38 - Ees how she is done http://developer.apple.com/ue/switch/windows.html	(top)
Apple's "Switch" campaign isn't just for potential customers; there's another side to the push, which has just recently (apparently) been released: a primer on Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for Windows developers seeking to start developing Mac apps. Apple's HI Guidelines have become somewhat iconic in the computer industry over the years; user-interface is one of those things that people in the industry usually grant without much complaint that Apple understands better and takes more seriously than just about any other software company. This document, which is posted fairly prominently in the User Experience section of the Apple Developer Connection site, is a brief overview of the areas in which the Mac's user experience principles differ from those of Windows; in what must be another first for Apple, in keeping with the baldly competitive spirit of the Switch campaign, the page explicitly lays out some examples of what's wrong with Windows UI design, and how the Mac OS UI designers would have done it better. There are all kinds of categories covered in the page. The reasoning behind not using the MDI interface model is given (the Mac has document-centric windows rather than application-centric), and the reasons why not to use custom UI widgets and non-standard keyboard shortcuts, and the importance of properly designed icons, and proper visually-compelling toolbars, and form layout principles, and the evils of Windows' stupid "Setup" procedure (versus a simple drag-and-drop installation, which Apple acknowledges is one of those things that Mac users cherish), and how filename extensions work nowadays. It's just a starting point for interested developers, but it's enough to make a guy get excited about designing an OS the way computers should work, and taking some pride in a good workflow and layout-- instead of just slapping some form elements on the page and never thinking about making it usable by regular people, let alone aesthetically pleasing. Anybody who takes any interest in the field of interface design, particularly those who may be interested in designing their own apps (regardless of platform), would do well to take a look at this page. It's fairly brief (though it links off to a lot of other detailed documents), it's illustrated and compelling and full of illustrations, and it represents something that I find relieves me a great deal: Apple is finally taking direct responsibility for preaching their ideas about computer design to the technical public, instead of relying on the geeks and the Mac faithful to educate people by writing websites about them. In Mac OS X, dialogs (including not only text but visual design) have a consistent format: Status, Reason, Action. They explain what the current situation is--and why a dialog has appeared--and offer action choices to the user. In other words, clear dialogs in Mac OS X communicate to the user: 1) what happened, 2) why it happened, and 3) what to do about it. To ensure that consistent format, Mac OS X dialogs tend to use verbs as button titles. Aahhh. Music to my ears.