Let’s have some standards, people!
A funny Tumblr blog is making the rounds in the office today – Read The Fucking HIG. It’s full of horrible examples of developers trying to reinvent the iPhone interface, and with the new Mac App Store launching yesterday, a clusterfuck of terrible designs given a virtually unlimited development space for application UI. 
I’ve talked about the Human Interface Guidelines in this very blog before, and they’re incredibly important. At Appiction, the first thing they had me do was read the HIG and get acquainted with its requirements and guidelines and I’m a better designer for it. A lot of people think restrictions tend to inhibit their creativity, but at a certain point, the fact that actual people are going to use the app, and are going to come into it with a set of assumptions about how an app works, becomes more important than needing your special “two-finger swipe backward to go back” design.
It’s not about what the phone/OS is capable of, it’s about what’s reasonable to expect people to deal with before they close your app and move on to one of the other hundred solutions that could probably also solve their problem. The less impediment you put between your user and their enjoyment of the app, the better. Period.
[link Read The Fucking HIG]
[link Or just read the actual HIG! :)]