Re: UI Guidelines -- What I'm doing

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com>]

On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 06:49:16AM -0700, Seth Nickell wrote:
>> Of course. We are also, of course, in a somewhat different position than the
>> authors of the MacOS guidelines: We have a large base of software already
>> written, and at least part of the UI guidelines work will probably be to
 
> This is not quite true. The Macintosh HI guidelines do change from OS
> revision to OS revision, sometimes in very significant ways (MacOS8
> applications are really different from MacOS6 apps!). Every time they do
> that they need to weigh the cost of changing the existing base of
> software against the desirability of the improvement. In fact, their
> position writing a guide today is similar to ours *except* their
> existing codebase is already somewhat conformant to a previous
> specification, insomuch as any deviance from the norm will force many
> applications to change in that regard.

Some of these changes are, I imagine, because of API changes. However, I've
read the Apple Human Interface Guidelines starting with the ones for OS 7 (I
believe) and going up to OS X, and there are still large shared parts. These
tend to be the philosophical, high-level parts, while the details change with
the implementation.


> HOWEVER! I am *not* saying we should just rewrite the Macintosh
> guidelines, even though I think the end result would be better. And the
> reason is that we will gain valuable knowledge and experience that will
> allow us to do better the next time. And better still the next time.
> Until (maybe in the future) we are writing guidelines that are as good
> as anything the Macintosh team produces. We need to excercise our UI
> muscles if we ever hope to have them be competitive. We're still
> learning how to do that with code, and we're a lot more experience with
> code than we are with UI right now, so we have a long way to go. Expect
> to throw one away, its a common principal of software engineering even
> when you are starting with a lot of experience (which we aren't).

I couldn't agree more with this.


>> rewritten, etc. That's the way to sloppiness.
 
> That's the way to avoid rigidity.

Oh, I'm not saying we shouldn't throw one away, I'm just saying we should
avoid going into the writing process with the mindset that things don't
matter much, since we're going to throw one away anyway.

-- 
   Joakim Ziegler - Ximian Web Monkey - joakim ximian com - Radagast IRC
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