Stephen Donner's Weblog

So far in these articles, I have only dipped a toe or two into Aqua's pool. I have covered basic aspects of building an Aqua-compliant application, including the building of photo-illustrative/3D application icons. Now it's time to address other components of our Mac OS X application.

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.

To help you become a good Aqua citizen, Apple has created a few guidelines. I've put together a brief overview of them, and we'll be tackling many of them in the months to come.

But limit your animations to whatever is required to communicate the necessary information. Avoid annoying animations that discourage ease of use. Ask yourself, "What do I need to show the user, and what is the cleanest way possible to achieve that?" A good example is the Mail application for Mac OS X. Whenever a new message arrives, the Dock icon changes appearance to indicate a changed state.

To help you become a good Aqua citizen, Apple has created a few guidelines. I've put together a brief overview of them, and we'll be tackling many of them in the months to come.

Other examples of these animations might be to show the status of an FTP transfer, the progress of media being digitized, or an updated time signature. And don't forget that users may want to have some control over this, so give them plenty of options, including the ability to turn these functions off.

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.

Adhere to Window Models. Document windows, Utility windows, Click-through, Layering, Drawers, Controls. How do users open windows, how do you properly title windows?

Dock Animation. Sometimes animating icons in the dock can be useful in communicating the status of the system or application.

Adhere to Layout Guidelines. Did you leave 12 pixels between your push buttons? Does the positioning of your pop-up menus make sense, and when do you use a pop-up versus a scrolling list? Are you using the right types of buttons for the proper functions?