Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Leopard HIG

The Apple (no longer Aqua) Human Interface Guidelines have been updated (via Jesper). I suppose the main contributions, for people already follow the Mac interface, are the official terminology that it introduces—“zero-width splitter,” “bottom bar”, “gradient button,” “capsule-style toolbar control,” “rectangular-style toolbar control,” “transparent panetc.—and the guidance about which enumerated constants and system-provided images are meant to correspond with which appearances. At least on a quick skim, it still seems to be much more about description than prescription or explanation. If you know what’s available but want to know when to use what, the HIG probably isn’t much help:

Use drawers only for controls that need to be accessed fairly frequently but that don’t need to be visible all the time. This is in contrast to the criterion for a panel, which should be visible and available whenever its main window is in the top layer.

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Basically, don't use drawers at all!

They're *so* 10.2… it's all about source lists and palettes now! :)

Yeah, I was actually expecting the new HIG to just say that drawers were deprecated. Instead, there’s the above nonsense, plus a new guideline not to put hierarchy in a drawer (like Mail did pre-Tiger and Preview does in Tiger).

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