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> As brutal as that UI was by today's standards For the record, the horribleness of QT 4.0's UI was a topic of conversation the moment it came out. The attenti

> As brutal as that UI was by today's standards For the record, the horribleness of QT 4.0's UI was a topic of conversation the moment it came out. The attention paid to UI quality by the industry has ebbed and flowed at times, but there was never a standard under which QT 4.0 was ok.

DonHopkins 8y ago
That's right! It would have been bad for any company to come up with that design at the time, but it was especially tragic coming from Apple, because it scuttled their sterling and meticulously earned reputation of purposefully designing user interfaces to be easily usable and learnable, and of going the distance to adapt to quirky human behavior, physical and physiological limitations, etc, and then documenting those designs and the rationales behind them, so other people can understand and apply them, and then actually applying those rules themselves. (But also unfortunately patenting some of those designs.) QuickTime 4.0 marked the end of an era of great user interface design at Apple. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17404345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17404345 >The original 1987 version of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines can be checked out from the Internet Archive, and should be required reading for serious user interface designers, the same way that serious art students should contemplate the Mona Lisa, and serious music students should listen to Mozart. Even though it's quite dated, it's a piece of classic historic literature that explicitly explains the important details of the design and the rationale behind the it, in a way that modern UI guidelines just gloss over because so much is taken for granted and not under the control of the intended audience (macOS app designers using off-the-shelf menus -vs- people rolling their own menus in HTML, who do need to know about those issues): http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf For example: pp. 87: Hierarchical Menus: https://i.imgur.com/RrEDo3m.png https://i.imgur.com/RrEDo3m.png pp. 88: Figure 3-42: Dragging diagonally to a submenu item: https://i.imgur.com/a0gNWHh.png https://i.imgur.com/a0gNWHh.png

DonHopkins 8y ago

That's right! It would have been bad for any company to come up with that design at the time, but it was especially tragic coming from Apple, because it scuttled their sterling and meticulously earned reputation of purposefully designing user interfaces to be easily usable and learnable, and of going the distance to adapt to quirky human behavior, physical and physiological limitations, etc, and then documenting those designs and the rationales behind them, so other people can understand and apply them, and then actually applying those rules themselves. (But also unfortunately patenting some of those designs.) QuickTime 4.0 marked the end of an era of great user interface design at Apple. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17404345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17404345 >The original 1987 version of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines can be checked out from the Internet Archive, and should be required reading for serious user interface designers, the same way that serious art students should contemplate the Mona Lisa, and serious music students should listen to Mozart. Even though it's quite dated, it's a piece of classic historic literature that explicitly explains the important details of the design and the rationale behind the it, in a way that modern UI guidelines just gloss over because so much is taken for granted and not under the control of the intended audience (macOS app designers using off-the-shelf menus -vs- people rolling their own menus in HTML, who do need to know about those issues): http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf For example: pp. 87: Hierarchical Menus: https://i.imgur.com/RrEDo3m.png https://i.imgur.com/RrEDo3m.png pp. 88: Figure 3-42: Dragging diagonally to a submenu item: https://i.imgur.com/a0gNWHh.png https://i.imgur.com/a0gNWHh.png