The thing that bothers me about Apple's drift from the HIG is that they keep adding whiz-bang new controls but they don't share them with the rest of the Mac developer community.
Look at Mail.app in Tiger.
The source pane on the left is a custom outline view. In addition to the background color (trivial to do) it also has the neat rounded selection rect for drag and drop and the custom badge when you drag more than one item.
The buttons beneath the source pane are custom jobs.
The highlighting of threaded messages in the messages pane is custom.
The header view beneath it is custom.
So basically everything you see in Mail is a custom control. Mac developers can recreate these things (some are trickier than others) but then the community ends up with 30 slightly different implementations of the + and gear icons. That, IMO, is what is degrading the consistency of the platform.
by returnself — Oct 23
Look at Mail.app in Tiger.
The source pane on the left is a custom outline view. In addition to the background color (trivial to do) it also has the neat rounded selection rect for drag and drop and the custom badge when you drag more than one item.
The buttons beneath the source pane are custom jobs.
The highlighting of threaded messages in the messages pane is custom.
The header view beneath it is custom.
So basically everything you see in Mail is a custom control. Mac developers can recreate these things (some are trickier than others) but then the community ends up with 30 slightly different implementations of the + and gear icons. That, IMO, is what is degrading the consistency of the platform.