In 1996 Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen published a thought experiment, The Anti-Mac Interface. It’s worth a read. By violating the design principles of the entrenched Mac desktop interface, G and N propose that more powerful interfaces could exceed the aging model and define the “Internet desktop.”
It’s been almost 20 years since the Anti-Mac design principles were proposed, and almost 30 since the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines were published. Did the Anti-Mac principles supersede those of the Mac?
Here I reflect on the Mac design principles of 1986, the Anti-Mac design principles of 1996, and what I observe as apparent (and cheekily named) Post-Mac design principles of 2016… Er, 2015.
Quite a read, but definitely worth it.
What a load of nonsense. First the lie about Mac inventing or defining anything, then the anti-mac definitions which are not anti but just complementing and silly named, and finally another article noticing 20 year later that they are complementing and declaring his “insight” a new revolution.
And the whole thing in a narrow-minded Mac fanboy view.
Edited 2015-08-03 22:05 UTC
I think it is quite nice for them that they provide a bullshit bingo with the article so there is no need to come up with our own.
The only good thing we learned from Microsoft BOB, was that skeuomorphic interfaces won’t always reflect the true nature of whay they’re supposed to represent.
are all the current operating systems starting to act the same? Windows 10, Gnome-Shell and Mac OSX, have an easy way of launching applications (finally).
Both Windows 10 and Gnome-shell use the ‘Windows key’ to bring up a search and then you type some letters and can select the application, I use this all the time. Mac OSX has Command+space. I’ve seen a hack for KDE to support it, not sure if 5.x has it, since I haven’t played with it. But it’s a great way to do things.
But I do find a lot of the differences in menus a tad annoying, for example, the ‘about’ dialog is always under Help under Windows/Linux DEs. Where as under the Amiga and Mac OSX, it’s generally under the primary program menu.
I do wish all applications, desktop environments would standardize on where the Okay / Cancel buttons are on dialogs, can’t tell you how many times I’ve clicked on the wrong one due to it being in the opposite place of everything else.