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Diane 🕵

@drahardja

No :blobsad:

The HIG is a design language, you're supposed to use the conventions of the language to more easily communicate your intent.

It was really weird when i was talking with someone who didn't know square boxes in a list were multi-select and round buttons were single select, and then I found old mac OS shipped with square radio buttons and I was confused, and also appreciated the power of using a consistent design language.

2 comments
Dave Rahardja (he/him)

@alienghic I was just kidding. I think the HIG is holy, and should be broken only in extreme cases where the app is doing something so out of the ordinary that it wouldn’t make sense otherwise—that doesn’t happen often at all, by definition. Adherence to the HIG is a sign of respect to the user; breaking the HIG is a sign of disrespect.

Early Macs used rounded rects for radio buttons, which later turned into circles. Funny thing is, I don’t think I ever saw a checkbox on old Macs—a checkbox was basically an ON radio button next to an OFF radio button.

I think checkboxes come later, but my memory is fuzzy. Here are some screenshots of System 3 and System 7:

@alienghic I was just kidding. I think the HIG is holy, and should be broken only in extreme cases where the app is doing something so out of the ordinary that it wouldn’t make sense otherwise—that doesn’t happen often at all, by definition. Adherence to the HIG is a sign of respect to the user; breaking the HIG is a sign of disrespect.

MacOS System 3 control panel
System 7 Views dialog
Diane 🕵

@drahardja

Yeah the left screenshot was the radio buttons that look kind of like the newer checkboxes. But yes, I agree that ram cache â—‹ on â—‰ off suggests they were using radio buttons.

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