Musings from The Software Underground

I'm a big fan of UI "Evolution" write ups, and do my own once in a while (maybe I'll do a post-mortum on MG 2). Daniel Jalkut posted a good one over at Red Sweater today. The "Lose the margins" thing is something I actually changed from MG 1 to MG to, and I even wrote about margins myself in the past.

Then I was sitting in Chicago at C4, listening to John Gruber talk about the “death of the HIG.” He brought up Brent Simmons, using his NetNewsWire as an example of somebody who had made a big impact by stepping outside the HIG guidelines. What Brent had done was an app that had broken with traditional HIG guidelines by eliminating the margins around the main views in his window.

I pretty much wound up following the Mail model, as you can see from the following screenshot.


And funny, I just had to deal with redoing all of the doc and website graphics myself, though I learned the layers lesson he mentions a long time ago, still what a pain:

The only downer to doing a GUI redesign is that all of your pictorial documentation becomes instantly obsolete. After the relatively fun work of designing the graphics and tweaking the layout, I realized I’d have to redo all of my Help Book graphics, and the screenshots for download sites and my web page.

Anyway, it's a good design read: Flex Your HIG