On 12/9/2010 2:05 PM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > > Also, Apple dictates style; to a lesser degree, so does M$. There's no > dictated style guide for Linux. That's outdated thinking. Apple's acquired some infamy among its fanboy base for violating their old style guidelines, which AFAIR were last updated back in the OS 9 days. OS X followed these rules early on, but probably more out of inertia than requirement from the top. These days, Apple's UI design changes regularly. The website -> widget -> mobile app progression accelerated this trend. Apple's users have come to accept that each app can be a world unto itself. I'd accept an argument that Apple dictates fashion, in the same sort of way Vogue or GQ does. As with any fashion, it changes with the seasons. Another argument I'd accept is that Apple has /taste/. They have it in greater degree than all but a few of their competitors, but it should be realized that it is also changeable. Observe Apple's nadir while The Steve was exiled. 40^W12 years of wandering in the Silicon Valley desert later, he returned, and Apple's design aesthetic improved greatly. Not up from zero, mind; the famous Jony Ive was at Apple before the return of The Steve. When Steve leaves again, Apple's sense of taste won't disappear, as it did not before, but it will change again. To drag this back on topic, it's true that a Red Hat or Ubuntu could decide to become more draconian about this, and start refusing to include apps in their distro that violate some arbitrary set of style rules. They're in a better position to enforce this than either Apple or Microsoft, since most of the software the average Linux user uses comes with the distro than comes with a typical Windows or Mac box. I believe there are efforts toward this, but a lot of the basics are still being overlooked: Enter doesn't always select the default action in a dialog box, there's still disagreement on the "quit program" keyboard shortcut, we still have at least 3 different clipboard-like mechanisms that don't interoperate, etc.