I know that this is picky but the old Apple Human Interface Guidelines specify things like how much distance you put between different elements! Try it out. Go for the 1992 edition of the HIG, for this System 7 look.
Like, when you have a dialog box, you have a certain number of pixels on the left, right, top, and bottom. The buttons are a certain number of pixels apart. If you look at old software from the very early days of the Mac, you’ll see that it’s kind of the wild west of user interfaces—either the HIG wasn’t out yet, or people weren’t reading it.
The HIG also has a bunch of good practices for thins like how to name buttons and menu items. Buttons should ideally be single words, and should be verbs. Menu items get a “…” ellipsis if there’s a dialog box that appears before you perform the action. The book shows how common interfaces look in non-English languages, like Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese.
Thin overhead super low contrast scrollbars that keep disappearing and have a hitbox even smaller than the visual part. I hate how this thing seems to have infected every single software. I've been using computers since I was 10 years old and these things give me some trouble, imagine someone who is not as comfortable with tech or has some disability, even a minor one. It's a trainwreck.
Like, when you have a dialog box, you have a certain number of pixels on the left, right, top, and bottom. The buttons are a certain number of pixels apart.
IIRC, if you were using DITL resources for layout (standard practice for dialog boxes), ResEdit would help you out by snapping controls to these spacings. If you were doing programmatic layouts, though, you were on your own.
Interesting, I hope they continue the interface guideline effort and are successful putting them into practice in their system.
One thing that Apple did well, as far as I can tell, was getting application developers to abide by the human interface guidelines, which made for a more consistent and seamless experience across apps.
In the modern hellscape of web apps, every app has its own appearance, interface, behavior, data formats, cloud storage system, etc. Moreover, control is strongly with the app developer/service provider rather than the user. Web apps routinely disable or alter standard features like cut and paste, or going back after clicking on a link. Upgrades are often forced and full of bewildering changes....
Which means that even if Apple (or HelloSystem) could force every desktop (or mobile) app developer to obey its interface guidelines, it would have no effect on the many web apps which people will still have to use.
Comments
I know that this is picky but the old Apple Human Interface Guidelines specify things like how much distance you put between different elements! Try it out. Go for the 1992 edition of the HIG, for this System 7 look.
Like, when you have a dialog box, you have a certain number of pixels on the left, right, top, and bottom. The buttons are a certain number of pixels apart. If you look at old software from the very early days of the Mac, you’ll see that it’s kind of the wild west of user interfaces—either the HIG wasn’t out yet, or people weren’t reading it.
The HIG also has a bunch of good practices for thins like how to name buttons and menu items. Buttons should ideally be single words, and should be verbs. Menu items get a “…” ellipsis if there’s a dialog box that appears before you perform the action. The book shows how common interfaces look in non-English languages, like Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese.
Good thing we innovated away all of that. Now we have hamburger menus and magically disappearing UI elements.
Yeah. No.1 PIA is a thin scrollbar on Serious Sam Mental difficulty.
Thin overhead super low contrast scrollbars that keep disappearing and have a hitbox even smaller than the visual part. I hate how this thing seems to have infected every single software. I've been using computers since I was 10 years old and these things give me some trouble, imagine someone who is not as comfortable with tech or has some disability, even a minor one. It's a trainwreck.
IIRC, if you were using DITL resources for layout (standard practice for dialog boxes), ResEdit would help you out by snapping controls to these spacings. If you were doing programmatic layouts, though, you were on your own.
Here are some screenshots and links for the 1992 edition of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines.
https://safereddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/me2r7j/macintosh_hum...
I wish Apple had a modern version of this that 1) was as well thought out and 2) they actually paid attention to.
helloSystem are doing something similar:
https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/developer/ux-guidelines.h...
Interesting, I hope they continue the interface guideline effort and are successful putting them into practice in their system.
One thing that Apple did well, as far as I can tell, was getting application developers to abide by the human interface guidelines, which made for a more consistent and seamless experience across apps.
In the modern hellscape of web apps, every app has its own appearance, interface, behavior, data formats, cloud storage system, etc. Moreover, control is strongly with the app developer/service provider rather than the user. Web apps routinely disable or alter standard features like cut and paste, or going back after clicking on a link. Upgrades are often forced and full of bewildering changes....
Which means that even if Apple (or HelloSystem) could force every desktop (or mobile) app developer to obey its interface guidelines, it would have no effect on the many web apps which people will still have to use.