| name | hig |
| description | Apple Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) lookup and routing for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS design work. Use when any Apple-platform design spec, term, or behaviour is in question — minimum tap target or hit target size, type sizes, Dynamic Type, safe areas, bar heights, corner radii, sheet detents, menu structure, native component names — or when work touches Liquid Glass-era APIs (glassEffect, GlassEffectContainer, scrollEdgeEffect, tabViewBottomAccessory) even without HIG framing. Model priors on Apple's current design system are stale (the HIG was rewritten for Liquid Glass in 2025–26) — never answer Apple design-spec questions from memory. Routes design and prototyping work to hig-design and HIG audits to hig-review. Also use to check whether the local HIG snapshot is current. For web-platform values on non-Apple work, use ui-craft. |
HIG
Coordinator and spec-lookup for the HIG suite. Snapshot: see references/versions.md — check its expiry before asserting volatile guidance.
Your training-data priors on Apple design are wrong. Apple rewrote its design system twice since 2024 (Liquid Glass, WWDC 2025; foundations rework, WWDC 2026). Opaque pinned tab bars, flat design, single-PNG icons, "Clarity/Deference/Depth", SiriKit, iOS 18/19 numbering — all dead. references/corrections.md lists what changed. Answer Apple design questions from the references or a live fetch, never from memory.
1. Route first
| Task | Lead | Load |
|---|
| Design, mock, or prototype a screen/app | hig-design | — |
| Port between iOS and macOS, "make a Mac version" | hig-design | references/adaptation.md |
| Implement or fix SwiftUI/Liquid Glass UI | hig-design | references/adapters/swiftui.md |
| Audit/review against the HIG, "does this feel native" | hig-review | — |
| Exact spec, term, or behaviour question | stay here | §2–§3 |
| "Is our HIG info current?" | stay here | §4 |
Composition rules:
- With the
prototype skill on an Apple-native target: hig-design's constraint sheet loads before generation; one combined checklist pass across all options after.
- With ui-craft on an HTML prototype of native UI: ui-craft owns web mechanics, this suite owns native idiom and metric values; on conflict, HIG wins for native-targeting prototypes.
2. Hot numbers (hop-zero crib)
Verified against the snapshot; each value's authoritative home is in references/tables/. If versions.md is past expiry, re-verify hot rows before asserting.
| Spec | iOS/iPadOS | macOS | src |
|---|
| Control hit target — default / minimum | 44×44pt / 28×28pt | 28×28pt / 20×20pt | tables/accessibility-sizes.md |
| Padding around interactive elements | 12pt bezeled / 24pt bezel-less | same | tables/accessibility-sizes.md |
| Body text — default / minimum | 17pt / 11pt | 13pt / 10pt | tables/dynamic-type.md |
| Text contrast (WCAG AA) | 4.5:1; 3:1 ≥18pt or bold | same | tables/accessibility-sizes.md |
| App icon source | 1024×1024px, layered, six appearances | same | corpus/foundations-identity.md#app-icons |
| Menu bar height | — | 24pt | corpus/components-menus-actions.md#the-menu-bar |
| Alert buttons | ≤3 (more → action sheet) | ≤3 | corpus/components-presentation-status.md#alerts |
| Toolbar title | <15 characters | <15 | corpus/components-menus-actions.md#toolbars |
| Ratings prompts | ≤3 per 365 days | same | checklists/review-compliance.md |
| Sign in with Apple button | ≥140×30pt, exact titles/styles | same | tables/brand-buttons.md |
| Tooltip copy | — | 60–75 chars, sentence case, no period | checklists/review-copy.md |
| Default iPhone canvas (Sept-rot risk) | 402×874pt | — | corpus/foundations-layout-typography.md#layout |
Tab/nav bar heights are no longer published by Apple — never invent them; see tables/metrics.md for provenance-marked estimates.
3. Lookup protocol
- Open
references/index.md (≤2K tokens) → classify the slug: corpus section (note file + anchor, → step 2), API symbol (glassEffect, UISheetPresentationController, … — note the target slug, → step 2), or live-fetch-only (niche topics, no corpus section, → step 4).
grep -n "^## <slug>" references/corpus/<file>.md → Read that file with offset at the match, limit ≈ section length (sections are 5–80 lines). Do not read whole corpus files for one question. If the loaded section names another slug as load-bearing for this answer, load that one section too — one hop max.- Answer with the exact value/term, citing slug + change date from the section's
src: line. State iOS and macOS separately when they differ — never "generally".
- If the slug is live-fetch-only, the section is a stub, the topic is in
versions.md's hot list, or the snapshot is expired: fetch live — scripts/hig-fetch.sh <slug>. If fetch is unavailable (sandbox/denied), answer from the snapshot and say so: "per snapshot 2026-06-10; live verification unavailable here."
4. Currency protocol
references/versions.md carries the snapshot date and expiry dates (Apple ships changes ~June/September/December). Past expiry → attach a staleness caveat to volatile answers, and offer to run scripts/hig-whats-new.sh.hig-whats-new.sh diffs Apple's changelog against the snapshot and lists changed pages and derived reference files needing review (via src: tags). A parse failure exits loudly — treat exit 2 as "unknown", never "no changes".- Full refresh procedure:
scripts/refresh-workflow.md.
5. Integrity rules
Cite exact values — never approximate. Never flatten platform differences. Every assertion traces to a corpus section (slug + date) or a live fetch. Numbers Apple doesn't publish are labelled with provenance and confidence. iOS/macOS 27 content is beta — keep it in delta blocks, version-gate it in answers. Mark uncertainty explicitly.
