

Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces - phalien
http://designshack.co.uk/articles/software/10-fresh-mac-apps-with-beautiful-interfaces-and-what-we-can-learn-from-them

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rbritton
1\. wunderlist. How is this beautiful? They crammed a wood-styled UI into OS
X's standard window chrome. The toggle switches at the bottom are not the OS-
provided ones and look like they're intended to match the iPhone app more than
the OS they're running on. Things is a far better example here.

2\. Reeder. See [http://danielkennett.org/blog/2010/12/analysing-a-touch-
to-d...](http://danielkennett.org/blog/2010/12/analysing-a-touch-to-desktop-
ui-port-using-fitts-law-reeder/)

3\. Sparrow. These are not OS X toolbar icons -- they're UIKit icons! They
look as out-of-place on OS X as OS X ones would on an iOS device.

5\. DaisyDisk. The UI here is very unique and usable. The mouse-over support
on the file graph is actually very, very useful for determining where storage
space is being used.

6\. Transmit 4. I personally found Transmit 3's favorites interface and
syncing interface to be more usable. The animations they've added slow down
use and some buttons (e.g., disconnect) are far harder to reach than in T3.

7\. Courier. While the interface is novel and interesting at first glance, I
have to question how useful it is for repetitive tasks. I have not used the
app, so I can't comment there, but more often than not fancy graphics get in
the way of speed.

8\. 1Password. This one I love. It's useful and very usable. I've used
multiple versions of this program and the UI changes they've made with the
current one far outshine the previous versions both in terms of appearance and
usability.

My only gripe still would be with the browser plugin. I've tried setting up
other less computer-savvy people to use it, and the menu does not make it
immediately obvious to them which item to select to log in -- the top several
options are too crammed together visually.

~~~
lmz
4\. It's not that unique, is it? I used KDE's FileLight[1][2] some years ago
and it had that same visualization.

[1]: <http://www.methylblue.com/filelight/>

[2]: <http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=9887>

~~~
burgerbrain
Exactly, and FileLight was hardly the first to have it either. This sort of
disk usage visualization is quite old.

~~~
smashing
Every time I see the wood interface, I think of Radio Shack and Tandy circa
1970's.

------
tumult
The performance of some of these apps is appalling. The Sparrow GMail client
idles in the background on my MacBook Air around 20 or 30% CPU usage on one
core. If you try to scroll the list of mail, resize the window, or breathe on
it wrong, it will chug, the graphics will stutter, and it will peg itself at
100% cpu for several seconds. If I have it running, it cuts my estimated
remaining battery life from 4 hours to 1 hour.

Kiwi 2, the twitter client, uses 100mb of ram for one twitter account. What?

I know most people aren't going to check these numbers or care, but when I
open an email client and feel my laptop getting warm underneath my hands,
_something is wrong._

~~~
callahad
Sparrow may not be _that_ terrible; on first launch, it fetches, caches, and
indexes the entirety of your Gmail account. I'm hoping that the CPU usage will
subside once it finishes that process, but I still have a few thousand
messages to go...

Edit: After finishing caching everything, Sparrow's CPU usage dropped to ~0%
when idle. Scrolling, however, causes it to rocket up to ~70-80% on a 2.66 GHz
Core i7 MacBook Pro.

~~~
riobard
It also uses about twice as much memory as Mail.app.

Anyway the interface is so much better that I'm willing to make the tradeoff!

~~~
bradendouglass
The app has some serious spikes, but just like you said, the interface blows
away Mail.app. Considering how infrequent most people should have their email
open, it is well worth the cpu usage.

------
Samuel_Michon
I agree that Transmit and 1Password are exemplary Mac OS X user interfaces.
The other apps mentioned: not so much. To me, they look like iOS ports. Lots
of chrome, wasted screen real estate.

My personal favorites:

Versions - <http://versionsapp.com/>

Kaleidoscope - <http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/>

Coda - <http://panic.com/coda/>

Espresso - <http://macrabbit.com/espresso/>

PixelMator - <http://www.pixelmator.com/>

BoinxTV - <http://www.boinx.com/boinxtv/overview/>

LittleSnapper - <http://www.realmacsoftware.com/littlesnapper/>

OmniFocus - <http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnifocus/>

~~~
frou_dh
Kaleidoscope is very pretty (as is its website), but the lack of ability to do
any editing/merging once you view the diff is jarring. I wish they'd spend
their time on that.

------
Daishiman
I'll probably get downvoted for this, but it looks like the UI for these Mac
apps is wildly inconsistent and each app has a very idiosyncratic idea of how
it should look, which many times doesn't seem to take usability into account.

I don't think it looks prettier, but to me most modern GTK apps on Ubuntu seem
much more consistent and strict as far as respecting the platform UI
guidelines.

~~~
cytzol
> "it looks like the UI for these Mac apps is wildly inconsistent and each app
> has a very idiosyncratic idea of how it should look"

Have you used an iDevice recently? Their apps are designed around the fact
that they can have the entire screen to themselves, and this sort of reasoning
is bleeding out into computer application development. Some of the designs
there could well be iPad apps, if it weren't for the window borders.

It's strange that when I used OS X, I was told that the proper way to do
things was to use floating windows instead of having everything maximised, and
now Lion is encouraging full-screen interfaces.

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mattparcher
My least-favorite trend in Mac app design: using Helvetica instead of Lucida
Grande, the system font, often because Helvetica is the default on iOS (cf.
Reeder, a Mac port of an iOS app).

Why is this wrong? 1) Lucida Grande was optimized for legibility on low- and
medium-resolution screens [1], and Helvetica is a 50-year-old print font. 2)
Lucida Grande is the system font, and other fonts stick out like a sore-thumb,
contrary to the consistency designer’s strive for [2].

The problem, of course, is that Apple keeps using Helvetica in their own Mac
apps, most recently across vast swaths of iPhoto, seemingly for the sole
benefit of making it more like an iOS app (especially when full screen),
disregarding much of what makes a Mac app unique.

[1] <http://www.tug.org/store/lucida/designnotes.html>

[2] <http://blog.cocoia.com/2008/swiss-interface-syndrome/>

------
elblanco
Far too many physical metaphors, I thought we got over that in the early 90's
with MS-Bob.

Designers, please, if you are thinking of using wood paneling or shelves in
your design, _stop_ , move on to the next idea.

------
foobarbazetc
The problem with a lot of Mac apps is that:

1\. They have glossy websites that talk about how awesome they are. 2\. They
have copy that claims they have awesome UI. 3\. You download them, try them,
and realize they do almost nothing except look pretty.

It's pretty hard to find exceptions to this.

------
51Cards
Daisy Disk isn't a new idea... the Windows Freeware 'Scanner' by Steffen
Gerlach was the first I saw to implement this disk view 8-9 years ago. Still
find that utility priceless to this day.

<http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/>

~~~
vasi
Filelight has also been doing this in KDE since about 2003. I still think it's
slightly easier to use than DaisyDisk, since the labels actually point to the
sunburst chart. But DaisyDisk does look much spiffier.

------
est
Hate to say this, but it's been a while since there is any beautiful UI
software on Windows.

------
ComputerGuru
I would put as number one the new and still-in-beta "Tower" git client for
Mac: <http://www.git-tower.com/>

------
lotusleaf1987
DaisyDisk is really awesome, I use this app a lot on my Macbook Air because
disk space is still relatively scarce compared to my other machines. I like it
a lot and recommend it.

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gcb
ah yes, let's praise inconsistent user interfaces...

I only like the SweetFM. wich is nothing clever, they just copied the first
version of the official lastFM desktop application (at least how it looked in
linux). Probably the guys at lastFM did some usability research and ditched
that old version for something more itunesque.

