Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines 1992

The Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines is Apple's own book, © 1992 Apple Computer, published by Addison-Wesley, 398 pages. It carries Apple's standard manual warranty text, which is how you can tell an Apple-authored Addison-Wesley title from a third-party one.

What it covers

Apple's definitive statement of how a Macintosh application should behave: the desktop metaphor, direct manipulation, consistency, feedback and dialogue, forgiveness, and then the detailed specification of menus, windows, dialogue boxes, controls, colour and language.

It matters to a repairer for one reason only: it is the manufacturer's account of correct behaviour, which is the baseline a software-side fault is judged against. If a machine's interface behaves in a way this book says it should not, that is a fault; if it behaves the way this book describes, it is not.

This is not a repair source

This is a programming book. It contains no schematics, no parts lists, no component values, no voltages, no connector pinouts and no service procedures, and nothing in it should be cited for a hardware figure. Apple's software documentation and its compiler manuals describe the machine as the programmer sees it, which is not the machine the technician sees.

For hardware data use:

Apple Service Source — Apple's own service manuals, module

 level: specifications, symptom charts, take-apart and module part numbers

Apple's Developer Notes — the one class of Apple developer document that does carry

 rail currents, expansion-slot power budgets and connector pinouts. Several are held here, for
 example Macintosh IIci Developer Note, Macintosh IIsi Developer Note and
 Macintosh LC 475 and Quadra 605 Developer Note.

Macintosh Repair & Upgrade Secrets and The Dead Mac Scrolls — component-level, for

 the compact Macs

What it covers

This is not a repair source

Related documents held here