Stephen Donner's Weblog

You Must Promise. To call your mother, to help old ladies cross the road, and to turn your cell phone off at the movies.

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.

Whether native or not, this is obviously one of the first steps on your way to OS X. Keep in mind that often, the functionality of your code has a lot to do with how your interface is designed. How many developers have come up with great functional ideas from working with their interface or looking at their competitors'? Start working on your Aqua compliance from day one. Don't wait until the last minute.

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.

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?

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.

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.

This is the first thing your users see, and probably the single most important visible part of your application. It is the first chance you have at making an impression and the best chance to help establish your brand.