Design Book Recommendation

I’m trying to work out the best way to redesign a window layout so that it looks and functions better than it does now. Just wonder if anyone can recommend any good books that cover this type of topic, preferably a book available on Safari Books.

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated on this topic.

On the Mac, the HIG is the bible for this kind of stuff. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/userexperience/conceptual/applehiguidelines/OSXHIGuidelines.pdf

Thanks Gavin, this looks like a good read and packed with information that will help. I never thought to have a look on the Apple dev site.

“same” exists for Linux and Windows. Sorry, no link.

For Windows this might help:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa511328.aspx

For Linux there are some guides - depending on the many, many window managers, but KDE and GNOME are very common. You might wanna check this:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_Window_System_desktop_environments

I recommend these two high-level books, which talk about UI concepts more than specific UI standards:

  • User Interface Design for Programmers, Joel Spolsky
  • About Face, Alan Cooper

@Gavin Smith , do you know if there is an update to Apple UI HI Guidelines for the new OS X X? I couldn’t find one, only the one linked by you from 2013.

I know eg that Apple changed the fonts for the first time, surely a lot more.

Andreas

Yosemite is not yet out, therefore the OS X Human Interface Guidelines don’t mention them. The guidelines have at the bottom a section “Document Revision History”. As you will see there are almost no changes over time. I’m not sure that the font change will be mentioned, because the Cocoa framework has methods to get the current system fonts:

  • boldSystemFontOfSize:
  • controlContentFontOfSize:
  • labelFontOfSize:
  • menuFontOfSize:
  • menuBarFontOfSize:
  • messageFontOfSize:
  • paletteFontOfSize:
  • systemFontOfSize:
  • titleBarFontOfSize:
  • toolTipsFontOfSize:

A properly developed Cocoa application - using only the above class methods of NSFont - will automatically use the correct fonts withYosemite (as with any other version of OS X).

Is it not what happens with Xojo ?