Updated Apple Style Guide Available on the Web and in Apple Books

Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2020/07/31/updated-apple-style-guide-available-on-the-web-and-in-apple-books/

Apple has updated its style guide, both on the Web and in Apple Books, which triggers TidBITS publisher Adam Engst to discuss how TidBITS makes stylistic decisions in writing and editing. He also examines a few of the changes to the style guide that Apple has made recently.

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I have found the use of “iDevice” to be a useful shorthand in some cases.

David Pogue was always more comfortable with coining terms than we were as well. :slight_smile:

I like to use the “right” term, even when a construction such as yours would be more convenient.

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I do so as well.

It’s a good thing that I am (almost) always right. :smiley:

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Every publication worth reading has a style guide: a list of rules that guides the content creation process and ensures correctness and consistency.

Thank you! My former employer had something like 30 regional offices and over 35,000 total employees. I worked in two of the regional offices, and not only was there not a standard for the entire organization, neither regional office had a style guide. Different authors in the same subsection would produce documents with different appearances! It drove me nuts. And these were for use outside the organization! (Perhaps it says more about me than the organization that I couldn’t make anyone in authority see the need for a style sheet.)

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest, and thanks for the interesting article on styles. Speaking of which, I still miss the style sheet capability of Word 5. It seems to me that Microsoft has garbled the interface to the point where it’s almost unusable.

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Wow, working for an organization that large without a style guide would drive me up the wall. I’d probably make one and distribute it like samizdat, via photocopies and anonymous faxes. :slight_smile:

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Thank you this this! I laughed out loud at your “rabble” remark. I’ve felt uncomfortable with that lower-case “i” for a long time; it’s good to know I’m not alone!

Glad you liked it. There are times when I turn to the thesaurus for just the right word.

Reminds me of a few times where I used a similar technique regarding networking protocol standards.

The official way to discuss and resolve issues is to ask questions on the appropriate IETF mailing list. But sometimes nobody bothers to answer a question, so what do you do? You can’t just wing it, because you need to interoperate with other vendors.

In these situations, I would ask my question including a detailed description of how I think it should work, asking the local experts if there is anything incorrect in my assumption.

If someone responds, great. Now I have an answer to my question. If not, there is now a public record of the approach being described and there being no objection. So there is at least some amount of justification when implementing the assumption.

Of course, that only goes so far. If everybody else (or even just one the “800 lb gorilla” companies, like Cisco) is making a different assumption, then you need to go along with it, because in the world of networking, being interoperable is far more important than being “right”.

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