Apple Posts Human Interface Guidelines for the iPhone
Apple is already well known for it’s original Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), which have been deprecated by the new Apple Human Interface Guidelines, tailored for Mac OS X.
Now, Apple has introduced a HIG for the iPhone. The document is primarily about making web applications that look good and work well on the iPhone. I skimmed through it, and I don’t see too much that’s ground breaking. Basically, if you’re an iPhone web designer with much design sense, the HIG will save you a few hours of trial and error. Still, it’s cool that Apple is providing one. It suggests they’re taking iPhone development seriously at a time when they’re clearly cracking down on unapproved 3rd party iPhone applications.
One interesting thing that jumped out at me in the iPhone HIG is this picture of a “Multiple select element”.
I haven’t used the iPhone much, but I’m interpreting this to be something like a drop-down list, but with the ability to select multiple options in the list. If this convention is something we can apply to normal, non-iPhone web pages, then it would be a huge space saver in some instances. Can anyone who has used this widget before comment on its usefulness?
The multiple select element is described in the iPhone HIG here:
iPhone HIG > Metrics, Layout Guidelines, and Tips > Be Aware of Default Control Styles
As a side note, for those interested in iPhone development, you should check out the Interactive Gestures Pattern Library, (the brainchild of Dan Saffer). It’s a wiki designed to collect touch interface design patterns, such as those used in the iPhone. The goal is to create a set of touch interface best practices, so as touch interfaces take off, all our future devices work similarly.
October 1st, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Without knowing much about the iPhone (but knowing enough about programming in general), I’m going to try and field your question. A multiple select element is probably just a fancy control that renders the html SELECT tab with the MULTIPLE element. I know .NET programmers love using advanced controls like this because it’s so much quicker to code stuff. By placing a single control on a screen, binding some data to that control, one can quickly retrieve an array of all selected items.
Practical uses of this control, from my experience, would be
1. Offering a list of newsletters to subscribed to.
2. Assigning security roles to a user.
Basically, anything that has a 1-to-many relationship might benefit from using this control.