Re: Apple and Cocoa (why don't they eat their own dog food?)
Re: Apple and Cocoa (why don't they eat their own dog food?)
- Subject: Re: Apple and Cocoa (why don't they eat their own dog food?)
- From: Jeff Disher <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 22:07:06 -0500
I think that you will be best off following what Apple says unless it
makes no sense, whatsoever (I can't think of an example since their
guidelines are pretty good).
The fact that Apple deviates from some aspect of the guideline
occasionally is hardly reason to pick one of those at random and follow
it instead of what they do in every other app they write.
Also, I beg of the entire developer community to not start using
Windows UI ideas on the Mac OS. It frustrates me to no end when
applications behave like Windows (ie: I hate how Safari doesn't make
the cursor invisible when I am typing!!!) because they assume that Mac
users want that interface. I think it is pretty fair to say that, if
we liked the Windows paradigm better, we would be using Windows in the
first place.
The closest thing we have to a common ground is the Apple UI guidelines
and they are very good. I hope that it doesn't become common-place for
developers to use another app's lack of conformity as justification for
their app to use some odd-ball UI paradigm.
I know that we are all annoyed with Apple's hypocritical approach to
UI, of late, but that is hardly reason to want the rest of the platform
to become completely chaotic. We all need to do our best to implement
the guidelines and suggest to developers that are writing confusing UIs
that don't conform to the guidelines, that they fix them.
If we all tend toward order, we will maintain a cohesive user
experience despite the occasional, isolated, mistake.
Just my thoughts on this,
Jeff.
On Monday, January 13, 2003, at 09:20 PM, Gregory Weston wrote:
On 1/13/03 at 12:47 PM, Chris Hanson <email@hidden> wrote:
There is a standard on the Macintosh and there has been a standard
for somewhere between one and two decades. (I'm not sure if the
standard was originally developed for the Lisa in 1983 - which did
have arrow keys - or for the Mac Plus in 1986. Or if it evolved in
the late 1980s.)
I have no background with the Lisa, but the arrow semantics were
introduced to
the Mac with IM4. Could've been earlier; there were arrows on the
optional
keypad for pre-Plus machines.
So it's not really Apple's problem; the guidelines have existed for a
*long* time and been relatively easy to implement for that entire
time. And they're trivial to implement in Cocoa applications. The
blame lies with developers who don't adhere to Apple's human
interface guidelines.
Including, it must be admitted, Apple.
So do we do what Apple says, or do what Apple does. And if the goal is
to
achieve an intuitable interface, is there sense in acknowledging that
99.44% of
Mac users are also familiar with Windows so maybe some of the Windows
conventions should be adopted - after careful consideration - from
simple
pragmatism.
(Personally, I'd prefer "no" but pretty much monthly I hear someone
complaining
about how they have to remember two sets of arrow semantics that are,
at this
point, different only due to momentum.)
G
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Jeff Disher
President and Lead Developer of Spectral Class
Spectral Class: Shedding Light on Innovation
http://www.spectralclass.com/
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