Re: "untitled" vs "Untitled"
Re: "untitled" vs "Untitled"
- Subject: Re: "untitled" vs "Untitled"
- From: John Stiles <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2005 18:29:27 -0700
On Jul 10, 2005, at 5:06 PM, Jan Neumüller wrote:
On 11.07.2005, at 00:43, John Stiles wrote:
In the context I was writing my statement, "engineering" meant
"the developers at Apple who are writing Carbon and Cocoa."
Applications may decide to deviate from the HIG in cases where it
makes sense, sure. But it's hard to come up with a case where the
framework itself (Cocoa) should violate the rules that specify how
the framework should operate (the HIG). And in this case it's very
clear that there's no compelling justification to violate the HIG,
except that some engineers think it's aesthetically displeasing.
Frankly, that's not a good justification for violating any
standard IMO.
Well as the name HIG says: Its a guideline - NOT a law. No one is
forced to do it that way and nobody can violate a guideline. I'm
even thinking of changing "untitled" to "unnamed" in my apps, as a
user names a file/document and doesn't title it. But perhaps thats
different in american english.
And I hate to say it but sometimes an engineer is more competent in
normal app-usage than a designer or psychologist who writes the
guidelines. I would always break guidelines if they don't make
sense for my apps, as is Apple...
Remember, Apple itself writes the HIG. If, in the development of the
Carbon or Cocoa frameworks, a framework engineer finds a portion of
the HIG which is just worthless or unimplementable or confusing, they
can walk over to the office of the guy who wrote that page of the HIG
and discuss how to amend it. Then they can change the HIG (or
alternatively, the engineer might learn why the HIG was correct to
begin with).
IMO, most developers--even for the Mac!---have very little aesthetic
sense and can't explain what makes a user interface "good." (Windows
quite obviously has many pieces of UI which were designed by
programmers, and it shows.) I think it's a bad idea to let engineers
arbitrarily override the guidelines, since the people who wrote the
guidelines tend to have thought things through quite well. I say this
with years of experience following the HIG... they've managed to
maintain a consistent Mac feel for many years, even across the 9->X
transition, with painstaking attention to very minor issues that most
of us would take for granted.
And in the (very rare) cases where the HIG isn't fully baked, and the
framework engineer feels that it cannot be implemented as written (or
would make a poor UI), I think they need to make sure the HIG is
amended for everyone's benefit.
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