Does Mac OS X violate Apple User Interface Guidelines?

Many Macintosh users I know are actually Mac/Unix users... we use Mac OS 9 as our windowing environment, and everything else we do in the shell.

I KNOW that I'm late to the bag-on-OS-X-resist-change party but I have to make these comments for the record. Please indulge me.

All the criticisms of not having a pre-emptive multitasking OS didn't faze us... because that isn't a feature, it's an implementation detail. Case in point: Palm OS vs. WinCE. Just like Palm OS, Mac OS gets out of the way and lets the apps app.

I attribute a lot of the success of Mac's OS to the attention they paid to user interface design. Call it artsy, they worried details like "how many pixels of space between the font and the edge of the button". (For an example of what happens when you don't worry these details, just download a Tcl/TK application) Apple's PDF's of Human Interface Guidelines, also available on Amazon: Amazon's listing

When I got OS X Developer Preview 2, we still had an OS 9 looking interface. It was truly surreal. A very comfortable, familiar windowing system... on top of unix. I opened a terminal window and stared at a prompt, not knowing what to do.

I was just in metaphor shock! I launch commands from Start->run in windows, I launch commands with TAB-completion in Unix, and I DOUBLE-CLICK in Mac OS.

Soon I became excited, and I realized what this could mean. The most seamless, truly plug-and-play windowing system, stitched around powerful, accessible underpinnings... now I could use my favorite apps, yet when I needed a driver for an obscure video card, I could just port the linux drivers!

At the time, I was working on an embedded GPS/MP3 player/WebCam for my car. The only barrier to using Mac hardware combined with Mac OS (voice control: built in! Airport 802.11: built in! etc, etc.) was a lack of drivers... which this would fix!

Then DP3 began to crush my dreams. My windowing system went away. Apple (God bless them) started crushing people who wanted to make skins to replace Aqua or copy Aqua. Aqua became an artistic statement that the artists refused to allow interpretation of.

Granted, that same harsh artistic control may have been what kept Mac OS 7, 8, 9 so pure and usable and cruft-free. That great specification, Apple Human Interface Guidelines, set the rules of the game, and every developer strived to make their app comply. Users could tell the difference in "feel" between apps and would reject apps that didn't work hard to be intuitive and consistent with the guidelines. And the best apps feel just right.

But there is no such spec for Aqua. When I was at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference a year ago, it almost sounded like nothing had been thought of up front on the UI. "What about skinning?" people asked. "We'll bring that up internally." They answered. "What about the control strip? (a very convenient, built in control panel access method)" we asked. "We'll get back on that."

The application panel in OS X has changed enough that I know it wasn't carefully studied to begin with. It's as if they are telling you which shell extensions you can and cannot use. As a community, we had to fight to get our hard drive icons back on the desktop!

I didn't realize how strongly I felt about this subject. I'm on OS 9 now, NiftyTelnetting SSH into my web server... just for a moment, I thought that my machine could BE that web server...

The whole Aqua interface seems designed around one main tenet: Keep cluttered Icons off the desktop because it looks messy.

How heartlessly arbitrary. I thought a messy desk was a sign of a brilliant mind or something... oh well. They are starting to spec out the new User Experience.

And all we wanted was protected memory.

I guess if it ain't broke, fix it.