pretty damn pretentious

The HIG Is Dead. Long Live the HIG.

An amazing thing happened the other day. Tweetie 2 / Twitter for Mac was released. Now certainly it wasn’t as shocking as, say, the release of Duke Nukem Forever or Textmate 2 would be, but I’m pretty sure it’s still a sign of the apocalypse.

Anyways, it was mostly met with bunches of enthusiasm but in parts of the Mac developer community, there was a bit of a backlash. It doesn’t conform to the HIG. The UI is non-standard. No title bar. Custom stoplights. Custom scroll bars. People’s shit was lost. Tantrums were thrown.

In the aftermath of the TwitterForMacpocalypse (it rolls off the tongue), Gruber posted an insightful piece on Mac UI design and its future. He made the point that there are really two schools of thought in Mac UI design: traditional and non-traditional / conservative and liberal:

The conservatives see non-standard custom UI elements as wrong. Liberals see an app built using nothing other than standard system UI elements as boring, old-fashioned, stodgy.

Gruber’s right of course, but he’s also missing a part of the story.

Programmers are infamous for having not-created-here syndrome where they insist on re-creating the wheel instead of leveraging someone else’s work. There can be good reasons for recreating the wheel, but often times it would be better to simply embrace someone else’s work.

Similarly, I think a lot of Mac developers suffer from the reverse: not-created-in-Cupertino syndrome—the idea that all UI that comes out of Cupertino is annointed and anything else is sinful.

But it’s not hard to see that that’s a bit simplistic. Apple consistently churns out fantastic UI, but let’s not forget the brushed metal craze or the trainwreck that is iTunes. Apple makes great designs because they employ great designers. But Apple doesn’t employ all the great designers. There are designers out there just as or even more talented than the designers in Cupertino.

We shouldn’t close our eyes and cover our ears when someone outside Cupertino creates a new UI—we should be celebrating and learning from them. Not all custom UIs will be good. In fact, most might be downright awful. But the only way progress happens is by people trying new things. Some parts of the Twitter for Mac interface are flawed but some parts are great. Really great. We should learn from that.

If you’re a programmer without any design instincts, by all means, use the standard controls and embrace the HIG. But if you’re working with a kickass designer and you can spend the time required to create custom UI, by all means give it a shot.

Sometimes you’ll succeed. Sometimes you’ll fail. But you’ll create something new. Don’t let not-created-in-Cupertino syndrome take hold.