With the recent Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard announcments at WWDC we all now know what sort of UI changes to expect from Apple this fall. The speculated and rumored scalable UI doesn’t seem to be a reality except for maybe the iPhone. Instead we have a more consistent implementation of the gray theme from iTunes 7.
And so the now infamous Apple Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) controversy continues:Searching for the HIG’s Bosun, at Daydream Blog.
I’m learning that some of the things that I’ve always stood behind from the original Macintosh design have indeed changed – but so far Apple hasn’t drafted any definitive stance to update the older HIG, at least not publicly. This seems to be what has made folks a bit upset along with the experimental nature of every new Apple application with a new UI that doesn’t match others. So the rules have changed – except that consistency is and probably always will be the way to go. Leopard appears to lock it down a bit, but we’ll see.