While reading Ars Technica’s excellent new review of Mac OS 10.5, I ran across a link to IndieHIG, a rather fascinating effort to produce a consistent set of Human Interface Guidelines for the Mac, to replace the official ones that Apple has neglected for so long.

I think it’s a really interesting effort, and I sure hope it’s successful — if only to shame Apple a little into producing a useful HIG. But more than that, if they do produce something that is widely used (and I suspect getting developers to adopt it may be more difficult than coming up with the guidelines themselves), it could be an interesting model for other environments where there is no central authority to promulgate an interface guideline.