doron's blaahg

If an application is designed well, the reward for users is that they will learn it faster, accomplish their daily tasks more easily, and have fewer questions for the help desk. As a developer of a well-designed application, your returns on that investment are more upgrade revenue, reduced tech support, better reviews, less documentation, and higher customer satisfaction. The rewards of building a good-looking Aqua application are worth taking the extra time.

To put my money where my mouth is, in each new article I'll build a hypothetical application that illustrates the guidelines I'm covering. Today's application is called "Paint" and will be based on the photo-illustrative icon I created in my last article. Together we will complete each step, and by the end of the project we should have a well-designed, 95%-100% Aqua-compliant application. I'll leave some room for personal preferences and the fact that Apple changes the OS every few months.

This topic is one we will tackle later in this article, but it refers to making sure that your application and the dock aren't fighting it out for supremacy of the screen.

To put my money where my mouth is, in each new article I'll build a hypothetical application that illustrates the guidelines I'm covering. Today's application is called "Paint" and will be based on the photo-illustrative icon I created in my last article. Together we will complete each step, and by the end of the project we should have a well-designed, 95%-100% Aqua-compliant application. I'll leave some room for personal preferences and the fact that Apple changes the OS every few months.

For my Paint application, I created a series of icons to simulate a rendering algorithm. While the application is performing this CPU-intensive task, you can always see the status of the document by the icon changing in the Dock.

Clicking an application in the dock should always bring forward an active window. If the user clicks on an open app's icon in the Dock, the application is active and all unminimized windows come along with it. I have found a few problems with windows behaving independently of their application.

Adopt Sheets. I really like the use of Sheets in OS X. The use of Sheets lets me know which window my dialogue belongs to without hijacking my system.

For my Paint application, I created a series of icons to simulate a rendering algorithm. While the application is performing this CPU-intensive task, you can always see the status of the document by the icon changing in the Dock.

At WWDC, I listened to Apple representatives make some excellent points about taking the time to build a 100%-compliant Aqua application, and I think all developers need to look beyond the code and listen to what the folks at Apple have to say

If an application is designed well, the reward for users is that they will learn it faster, accomplish their daily tasks more easily, and have fewer questions for the help desk. As a developer of a well-designed application, your returns on that investment are more upgrade revenue, reduced tech support, better reviews, less documentation, and higher customer satisfaction. The rewards of building a good-looking Aqua application are worth taking the extra time.