Foreword

THIS is a book about creating beautiful applications. Not just blizzards of text boxes and buttons in some nondescript standard look-and-feel, but applications that are truly beautiful.

If you wind the clock back enough years, the world of graphical user interfaces was ruled by standardized look-and-feel specifications. This approach was taken in an effort to centralize all of the GUI coding in applications, make it easy to document the applications (everyone knows what a slider does, therefore it doesn’t need to be described), and work around the relatively poor graphics performance of desktop computers.

But the last decade’s collision between the computer industry and the consumer has led to a huge increase in the emphasis on aesthetics ...

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