find . -name '*.eps' -exec perl -pi -e 's/^(%%[^:]+:)(\S)/$1 $2/' {} +People put a lot of thought into computer user interfaces. Here I summarize some of the more important documentation resources. As a rule, the further back you go in history, the better it was. Seriously, everything after year 2000 is ugly and/or trash.
See why this stuff matters. Or, to quote a visually-impaired person:
Windows 95 interface was fine, yeah. For me, it’s all about the keyboard shortcuts. The thing that made the Windows 95 style fine was being able to rely on being able to hit Alt → F → S and save the file every single time in every single app.
Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (1992) pretty much define all conventional GUIs. All non-Apple HIGs aspire to be worthy rivals.
Mac OS 8 Human Interface Guidelines (1997) are a follow-up to that.
Apple Human Interface Guidelines (2009) is yet another update, this time for Mac OS X. Older version (2002).
Finally, the newest Human Interface Guidelines, which do not limit themselves to desktop computing anymore, are only available online, making them harder to browse, and take a lot of things from the previous documents for granted.
Don’t get me wrong, they took this matter seriously. But they’re Microsoft. Mediocre is their best, for one reason or another.
Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit Application Style Guide, Version 1.03 (1986) is already surprisingly comprehensive, and not even that outdated.
The more modern Windows guidelines can be found in their neatest form as printed books:
The Windows Interface Guidelines for Software Design (1995, ISBN 1-55615-679-0 or 978-1556156793) corresponds to the Macintosh document.
Microsoft Windows User Experience (1999, ISBN 0-7356-0566-1 or 978-0735605664) is an update for Windows 98 and 2000.
If you want to go digital, all you have is a bunch of poor choices:
A pre-release PDF of the first book makes for the most comfortable reading.
With an awkward HTML-to-PDF conversion of the second book (or this one) things starts going south—the Internet Archive contains snapshots of it, as well as of all sorts of other curious human interface stuff, but it’s screwed up in various ways. E.g., some image paths use ‘\’ separators rather than ‘/’.
And it continues downhill:
Various style guidelines of Windows XP/2003 era are arbitrarily placed within Microsoft Management Console 3.0 Guidelines.
User Experience Interaction Guidelines for Windows 7 and Windows Vista (2010) are about as vomit-worthy as the operating system releases they represent, and as of writing still available in web form.
Windows 8 User experience guidelines innovatively use grey text on printed media. Actually, it might be a good thing that they discourage you from trying to read this.
User experience guidelines for Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps is where they finish turning everything into complete and total shit. Universal shit.
To end on a better note, with Windows 11 they finally stopped looking for designers in local kindergartens: Design and code Windows apps might be a poorly structured web disaster randomly interspersed with technical details, but at least your eyes won’t bleed anymore. Although.
To get the Windows 98 look in a web page, you can use this stylesheet.
It started with a respectable attempt, and a modest announcement.
GNOME Human Interface Guidelines 2.2.1 is the last stable release concerning GNOME 2. (I painfully put together a workable XSL stylesheet myself at first, and rendered my own HTML, before I managed to locate that version online. Mine looks a bit neater at least.)
GNOME 3 brought an update reflecting various significant deviations of those series, such as importing header bars and symbolic icons from Mac OS X, or the removal of menu bars (thus ensuring the UX stays worse than where they source all inspiration).
The current GNOME Human Interface Guidelines are a confusing shadow of where it all started, as usual. Making the font larger, the text narrower, pages shorter, and half of the rules implicit doesn’t make documentation any more useful.
First off, you should be aware of IBM Common User Access, which are hard-to-find documents. It’s not clear to me how much of it overlaps with Macintosh, and which parts are original.
OpenStep User Interface Guidelines (1996) exist, which evolved directly from…
NEXTSTEP User Interface Guidelines (1993, Part No. N6119). A 1995 revision without the introduction can be found on the 3.3 Developer ISO: mount it from Linux, find …/Apps/NextDev/UserInterface/, fix invalid EPS header lines:
find . -name '*.eps' -exec perl -pi -e 's/^(%%[^:]+:)(\S)/$1 $2/' {} +open it with Pages on macOS (before Sonoma), fix the page layout, concatenate the chapters, set up a ToC, and you can export it as a passable PDF or anything else you’d like. (What a journey that was.) You can also browse that version through links at the bottom there.
Amiga User Interface Style Guide (1991) is a pretty book… and uses Futura.
RISC OS Style Guide (1993, updated 2015).
No matter how utterly horrible Java looks most of the time, it also has these (1999, web).
Motif/CDE likewise (1997), and they even had a certification checklist.
Haiku Human Interface Guidelines (2006, with only minor changes since then) is actually a DocBook XML, and the current stylesheet makes it not show its title.
KDE historically never could into design, misalign stuff, choose bad padding, etc.
Someone's gallery of user interfaces, should you be interested in what everything looked like.
On macOS and modern GNOME, which has become a wannabe clone of the former anyway, pressing the right mouse button invokes a context menu immediately. Not so on Windows, where you can drag items this way.
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