Another stop on the way to a fuller look at the Vista User Interface Guidelines. This will be the last one I promise...
WINDOWS XP
For designing any user interface in Windows XP (and generally Windows) you need to know Design Specifications and Guidelines - Visual Design. This specifies how you are supposed to lay out your user interface and how allthe elements should fit together. I use this to hand code my resources for MFC user interfaces, when it is all consistent you will be surprised how much better and more professional it looks. One thing I can't remember if it is covered is make sure your tab order is correct as when working with resources it is possible to get it wrong.
VISTA
The Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines have been available for a while. By available I mean exist as a placeholder that someone will eventually be forced to write.
The most substantive part of the Vista UI Guidelines is the Top Rules for the Windows Vista User Experience which are extremely shallow and a bit of a red herring for good UI design. It even asks for things that the applications provided with Windows Vista are unable to follow.
All of the Vista guideline are so shallow that even the most obvious things like what will be the user interface differences between Basic and other Vista versions are not covered. For those of you that haven't heard the standard home version of Vista will be supplied with the "Aero Basic" theme that does not have the bells and whistles. It makes no mention of how to lay out controls consistently and intuitively. Also it says use Vista style icons and so on, unfortunately the icon guidelines hve not been published yet.
APPLE
Trust Apple to show you how it is done. They have comrehensive developer documentation on how to supply a well integrated consistent interface for OS X. They can be read here.
The human interface guidelines are available here. This covers all you need to know for a professional looking OS X application. The documents keep evolving and get better like with the recent icon addition.
Gnome
The Gnome desktop has a well know human interface guidelines. It is really quite in-depth and puts Microsoft to shame.
KDE
The popular Linux desktop environment also has a set of user interface guidelines.
You can read a previous post about icon guidelines for various platforms here.
