
Show HN: Desktop Fruit – A Curated Blog of Mac App Design - BrendonTO
http://desktopfruit.com
======
jolux
I'm not sure how you can call any of this "Mac App Design". To boot, none of
it follows Apple's interface guidelines. At all. And beyond that, none of them
can be using standard Cocoa UI elements. So they're all highly unfeasible.

Beyond that, none of them are good. It probably seems harsh to say that, but
none of these really do any important thinking about how interfaces are
supposed to work. Design isn't just making stuff pretty, it's making stuff
work well. Most if not all of these apps are basically a fresh coat of paint
on an existing product or the envisioning of a new product as it is similar to
the current form.

To summarize:

\- None of them look like Mac apps

\- All of their interfaces are superficial

\- Most of their interfaces are difficult to replicate in the native Mac
development environment without extensive custom work

\- None of them actually exist beyond being pictures!

How do you know that any of these ideas are actually good without trying them?
A picture's worth a thousand words, but if it looks better than it works it's
worth a huge loss in customers.

Sorry if this sounds grumpy, I just don't really understand the point of this
at all. Everyone who's interested in pie-in-the-sky conceptual app designs
that are more focused on eye candy than usability has dribbble already.

~~~
aylmao
It's design, just not good design? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Regardless of viability, they are original. Throw away what doesn't work,
savage what does, good to get the creative juices flowing.

~~~
jolux
good design is often original, but it is not often good because of its
originality

I personally find wire framing and loose brainstorming much more effective
than creating detailed mockups like these to crete good designs, but YMMV.

------
mortenjorck
The title is a bit off - this isn't so much a blog of Mac app design as a blog
of speculative Mac app UI concepts.

Some of them are quite nice in purely visual terms, but they tend to lack any
rigorous UX thought. The Slack one is a perfect example: Yes, putting the
channels, direct messages, and private groups into their own tabs _looks_
neater, but now I would have to click twice instead of once each time I
switched between the two channels I use most often.

~~~
jrcii
> they tend to lack any rigorous UX thought. The Slack one is a perfect
> example

The background transparency is nice looking as long as you're not actively
using your computer for anything and don't have any windows open.

------
pavlov
Apparently a mobile app becomes a Mac app when you add the "traffic light"
window controls to the top-left corner.

What particularly irritates me is that these concepts show tiny little apps
floating on an empty desktop. Which Mac user has a single app running at a
time?

In the real world, a Mac app will be overlaid on top of dozens of other
windows. And then all those blur backgrounds turn into grey smudges, because
the content of the underlying windows is mostly text.

------
golergka
Most of these concepts irritate me to no end by such enormous amount of wasted
whitespace. May be it's an irrational thing (after all, personally I usually
work with a pair of 1680x and 4k monitors and have no shortage of pixels), but
I just don't get it: why use all these gigantic margins and spaces when
instead UX designer could've just made the window smaller?

~~~
CharlesW
The thoughtful use of white space (a.k.a. negative space) can improve
readability/scannability, and to guide users by helping to create a visual
relationship between various UI elements.

Cosmetically, generous negative space can help create a feeling of
sophistication and elegance. I suspect that this kind of use is more offensive
to practical people who have little use for how something "feels".

And of course sometimes it's overdone by designers, especially in cases of
concepts serving as shiny, happy portfolio fodder instead of serving real
users and business goals.

~~~
seandougall
Whitespace can improve readability, but only up to a point. The Slack concept
currently at the top of the list would fit less than a minute's worth of
conversation in a moderately busy Slack channel, so the increased readability
of individual messages comes at the cost of dramatically decreased readability
of the conversation as a whole.

------
ctomaybe
Snooze.

Concepts are a dime a dozen and while these are nice pieces of art I can't
really take them seriously as App designs.

Focus on real products and the people making them.

------
jafingi
While these designs looks good, I would absolutely not use any of them, as the
_usability_ is non-existing. This also describes well why the designs doesn't
follow Apple's HIG.

------
xixixao
Lovely, but funnily enough I think most of these would work just as well on
Windows or the web.

------
matthewmacleod
Contrary to the other feedback you seem to be getting, these are really nice -
thanks for sharing!

I wonder if people are maybe missing that these are concepts and not fully
developed designs, so they aren't perfect. It's like a concept car: there are
ideas and themes that will make it to production, even though there would be
extensive changes to productionise them. And that's pretty useful to see.

------
coderdude
This is great. Big fan of curated lists. Keep it up.

------
charlesism
Okay, I'll bite :) I was hoping to get some inspiration, but it's a website
full of identikit flat designs. What are the designers going to do a year or
two from now when "Flat Design Considered Harmful" articles start filling up
the front page of HN.

------
BrendonTO
Recognizing there are a lot of opinions on Mac app design/visuals/etc., if you
have any suggestions for future posts feel free to send them to
desktopfruit@gmail.com.

------
jonaf
What the... For Mac app design concepts, these all suuuure look like Windows!!
Where's the brushed metal, the shaded orbs, the soft drop shadows?

~~~
matthewmacleod
Back in 2009. Mac app design has changed significantly in the past few years.

