macos-design-guidelines

The macos-design-guidelines skill provides structured guidance based on Apple’s macOS Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) for building desktop applications. It focuses on helping developers design Mac apps that align with user expectations around discoverability, efficiency, and deep system integration. On macOS, users rely heavily on the menu bar and keyboard-driven workflows, and this skill translates those expectations into actionable rules for consistent application design.

The skill emphasizes core interface requirements such as maintaining a complete and properly structured menu bar, ensuring standard menus like App, File, Edit, View, Window, and Help are present, and applying consistent keyboard shortcuts for all actionable menu items. It also covers dynamic menu behavior, including enabling or disabling menu items based on application state and updating menu titles to reflect context, such as changing labels depending on selected content. Implementation examples using both SwiftUI and AppKit illustrate how to build menus, attach keyboard shortcuts, validate menu items, and integrate command groups or custom commands into existing system menus.

In addition, the skill highlights the importance of contextual menus for interactive elements and reinforces macOS conventions such as using standard shortcut mappings for common actions like copy, paste, undo, and save. It is intended for macOS developers working with SwiftUI, AppKit, or Mac Catalyst who need to ensure their applications feel native and intuitive. Product teams and UI designers can also use it to align design decisions with Apple’s expectations for desktop software behavior and user experience consistency across the macOS ecosystem.