Re: UI guidelines and the libraries

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

On 11/27/01 12:11 PM, "Havoc Pennington" <hp redhat com> wrote:

> A point about the HIG - it needs to follow the Mac guidelines in one
> important respect, which is that the guidelines should be easy to
> implement using the stock libraries. In fact I think it would be a
> good idea to go ahead and have notes in the HIG on how to implement
> each of the suggestions in code, when it might not be obvious.

I agree completely with what Havoc is saying here. But, as Pee Wee Herman
would say, there's a big but.

The Macintosh human interface guidelines often got "out in front" of the
libraries. There were often things in there that were not yet easy to
implement with the stock libraries -- then later they got easier to do as
the libraries were improved.

On the other hand, as a Macintosh software developer, I found this extremely
frustrating.

But we do want to avoid at all costs a situation where the library makes it
easy to do X, the human interface guidelines say to do Y, and everyone just
flips a coin.

    -- Darin