The most interesting piece of this puzzle is that when developers violated the UI guidelines in the past, it was out of apathy or misunderstanding of how the Mac works
Well, sorta, but that's far from the full story.
Certainly some Mac developers violated the UI guidelines out of ignorance or indifference, but many developers had to "violate" the rules in order to do things that Apple weren't doing.
Keep in mind that up until relatively recently, Apple frowned on such UI elements as "sound" and "color". (Check out Toolbox Essentials on this topic.) Even animations are the new kid on the block, UI-wise. Many of the rules that Apple laid down were designed for another interface era: a time of static, mostly-modal interfaces, for an OS which was fundamentally ill-equipped at truly doing multiple UI tasks in real time.
Games developers, in particular, had to constantly break the rules: there was no Toolbox API functionality for "render my pretty custom control and composite it nicely alongside a Control". Most anyone doing real-time work (video, compositing, games, etc.) found that at some point, the guidelines were irrelevant, didn't work or didn't exist.
by David — Jan 01
Well, sorta, but that's far from the full story.
Certainly some Mac developers violated the UI guidelines out of ignorance or indifference, but many developers had to "violate" the rules in order to do things that Apple weren't doing.
Keep in mind that up until relatively recently, Apple frowned on such UI elements as "sound" and "color". (Check out Toolbox Essentials on this topic.) Even animations are the new kid on the block, UI-wise. Many of the rules that Apple laid down were designed for another interface era: a time of static, mostly-modal interfaces, for an OS which was fundamentally ill-equipped at truly doing multiple UI tasks in real time.
Games developers, in particular, had to constantly break the rules: there was no Toolbox API functionality for "render my pretty custom control and composite it nicely alongside a Control". Most anyone doing real-time work (video, compositing, games, etc.) found that at some point, the guidelines were irrelevant, didn't work or didn't exist.