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The Ten Most Beautiful OS X Apps
Phillip Ryu writes "As someone in the Macintosh shareware business, as part of my job, I make the daily crawl through MacUpdate to look for the latest and greatest in Mac software. One thing I've been noticing recently is a renaissance of extremely polished and beautiful Mac apps, so I thought I'd share some of these finds with you guys. Without further ado, presenting the top ten most beautiful OS X apps. Hopefully you'll find some new gems in there, even I found a few surprises while compiling this list. Enjoy!"
Hmm... well I guess there is some inherint minimalist beauty.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
I have to say, I absolutely love this program. Though I'm working with an older version, It's quite possibly the best file-sharing program I've used. (All others PC, haven't tried others for the Mac)
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
The UNIX community has it right: design a minimal UI and let the community produce attractive skins and extensions. Just look at Mozilla Firefox: on each of my boxen, a precisely-crafted user experience is the result of countless skins and extensions that would simply not be possible on the sealed-tight car bonnet that is Mac OS X.
To save your eyes from that god-awful ugly site
10 - Transmission
9 - Potion Factory
8 - Podcast Maker
7 - Transmit
6 - Quinn
5 - AppZapper
4 - AcQuisition
3 - CoverFlow
2 - Newsfire
1 - Delicious Library
Only #3 and #1 have any place on that list.
There are so many more visually appealing OS X apps out there. Most of his list is just file-list style apps. A downloader? Good grief.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but the "right"-est MacOS app ever is, hands-down, Fetch. Every time I ever wondered "Maybe Fetch could do this...?", it always could and the first way I thought to try it always worked.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Mac OS X, like any other system, is infinitely extensible--you just have to know where to look.
Just one example: I rewrote and recompiled a kernel extension to quiet my PowerBook's fan. There are dozens of community sites built around hacking the system. Easy things easy, hard things hard, complexity beneath elegance and all that.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
I foresee a problem: They'll all tie for first-place ugliest application. The only exception, Firefox, will show at #2.
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
VirtualPC running Windows XP!
Argh! My eyes...
Can we please save the blog spam for digg and roland's submissions? kthx!!
LaunchBar is Spotlight on crack. These guys managed to pack as much functionality as the finder itself into a little bar at the top of the screen. And it's fast.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
> Wow! It's just incredible!
That's one word for PHP-GTK, here's another, "slow". You could have learned lua and another widget set in a man month and your users would thank you from the bottom of their RAM usage.
I find Cabos to work a lot better than Acquisition, at least the Acquisition that existed 2 years ago (last time I tried it).
With the first link, the chain is forged.
That is one amazing app. I love it, why did I now know about this?
Every time I try to mention the nice eye candy in OS X, I always get slapped with "The best application in OS X is something called bash." Morons. I know that. But bash doesn't look pretty... well, not in a "Oooooh, look at the pretty colors" sort of way. It's beautiful in that it's simple, usable, stable, and ... cryptic.
I don't want a command-line desktop. I want command-line servers. Desktop pretty. Server ugly. Pretty server UI useless. (Ugg!)
So, before you Linux zealots start coming out of the woodwork... let me remind you about us Mac zealots. There may be a helluva lot less of us, but we're a *WHOLE* lot more crazy!!!
(All in jest - Happy Independance Day, to all of you in the world's favorite consumer-culture.... I'm going home!)
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
You beat me to it. Exactly how am I supposed to trust the aesthetic judgements of someone who thinks that putting blue text on a blue background is a good idea?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If Beautiful is Functional, then only winners of beauty pageants could fix cars. And I'd trust ugly joe command line app more than I'd trust ms. california any day.
... doesn't always echo another man's. This list proves that statement. AdiumX is such a good application in Mac OS X... I'm surprised Apple hasn't taken it up themselves, and frankly, the author of this list all of my respect by not even mentioning it. This is just an absurd list put together by an amatuer. So a downloader has a nice GUI... big deal? Not in my book.
Linux can look like almost any OS out there, including their eye-candy effects. So either you've never used Linux seriously, or you're saying every other OS out there is ugly compared to it.
http://www.phillryu.com.nyud.net:8090/2006/07/03/t he-top-ten-most-beautiful-os-x-apps/
Won't somebody _please_ think of the servers!
Or he's trolling. Which one do you think is most likely?
Serious question : how can a X11 application look and feel like an OS/X app ? If this is not an X11 app, why do you need X11 installed ?
Other serious question, why not PHP-QT, which uses the native carbon bindings and doesn't require X11?
If you've gone to a lot of trouble to fake the OS/X behaviours, why not change the toolkits ?
...should be in how the application interacts with you, not how it looks.
Most of Apple's own programs seem to have exactly this type of beauty.
If you've gone to a lot of trouble to fake the OS/X behaviours, why not change the toolkits ?
There are several man-years invested in the current application. With that, you don't just "change the toolkits" without at *least* a year in the making.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
That's one word for PHP-GTK, here's another, "slow". You could have learned lua and another widget set in a man month and your users would thank you from the bottom of their RAM usage.
Slow, perhaps, if you are writing a video game, or a performance-intensive app. We're doing neither. We provide software to administer schools - grades, credits. and the like. For which PHP-GTK does just fine.
We don't have many complaints about performance, even though the average use consists of a database of a few hundred MB. We list our minimum specs as PII/PIII at 500 Mhz or better, 128 MB RAM, 256 recommended. 256 MB of RAM runs about $15 on the open market. Computers exceeding these specs can be had on EBay for less than $100.
What users are these that will thank me, again?
As far as learning another toolkit, what about porting over the existing application, now having several man-years of invested time?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I have a feeling there a lot more of the Mac kind, actually.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
There are probably a million reasons why I'll get clobbered for this, but I'm going to throw caution to the winds and post it anyway:
Using the idea that utility is at least as important as beauty, I'm going to nominate my brand-new copy of NeoOffice. Why? As a single user and owner of a small business, it lets me compose, proofread, and print out a document--and then print out an envelope to mail it in. It allows me to email that same document in Word doc format to my brethren and sisteren who don't use Macs and don't have a clue as to file formats. It does all of this consistently and without any errors that I can discern. It does it without firing up a UNIX terminal emulator. It does it without my having to make my ponderous way through installing a cheap non-Postscript printer under UNIX. And it does it all for the price of the monetary donation I was delighted to contribute. It doesn't look too bad, but I wouldn't care if it was as ugly as sin.
So I say, Beautiful. Just absolutely beautiful.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
The thing is I've never seen an X11 app behave sensibly under OS/X with the rest of the applications. Printing is special, services don't work, menus are not where they need to be. Drag-and-drop ? Did you manage all that ? Just about the only thing that works by default are the 3 buttons on the window's frame.
If so this is a major undertaking, and If you really pulled all of that off in under a month, my hat's off to you, and I'd like a screenshot !
Please consider giving the OO.org people a tip or two.
I've personnally written a largish application that sort-of-works OK under OS/X, but with all the above caveats. I'm seriously thinking about rewriting the lot with a more sensible toolkit, in this case QT. It doesn't take as long the second time, apparently.
For example, I look at the #1 application "Delicious Library" and wonder how it would fare with my collection of around 2000 CDs or my friend's 300 DVDs for that matter. I agree it is beautiful, but not very practical IMHO ...
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
The thing is I've never seen an X11 app behave sensibly under OS/X with the rest of the applications. Printing is special
... combined with a decent installer, printing through Safari/PDF, etc. and I'm happy.
As it is with PHP-GTK under Windows. Our application generates PDFs when it needs to print and makes a shell call to open whatever app prints PDFs. Works fine in our case, may not work for others.
services don't work
Ahem? Can't respond.
menus are not where they need to be.
Menus appear in the same app as the rest of the application - perhaps this is more weird to a Mac user, but we've gotten no complaints so far.
Drag-and-drop ?
Our app doesn't use any Drag-n-drop.
Did you manage all that ? Just about the only thing that works by default are the 3 buttons on the window's frame.
I've personnally written a largish application that sort-of-works OK under OS/X, but with all the above caveats. I'm seriously thinking about rewriting the lot with a more sensible toolkit, in this case QT. It doesn't take as long the second time, apparently.
I *guess* I'm in the same camp. Since the purpose of our product is to produce PDFs, it seems silly to do anything more than what we've already done.
And our Mac users love it, so it's still cool! And it looks way better than I'd been expecting.
BTW: I probably spent half of that man-month just getting cozy with MacOS internals. (I'd never used it before) Things like fink, Xcode, etc.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
PS: One of the concerns I have with QT is licensing - although the license fee they ask for commercial use is definitely reasonable, it's just another reason not to... with GTK I have no worries.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
In other words:
- Services don't work, so the app can't be extended w/ Services --- no auto-setting of capitalization as desired, no interaction w/ Address Book, &c.
- no drag-drop support, so one can't populate a field from text already on-screen w/ a select, click, drag, release.
- what about AppleScript? Can your app be used in an Automator work-flow?
I'm glad to have X-11 apps as a fall-back for when there's nothing native, but they're nowhere near as nice --- take a look at Nova Mind for an app coded in Cocoa, but available in Windows and Linux through GNUstep
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
beauty is in the eye of the beholder. some people love brushed metal windows, some hate them, so any list is going to have some level of bias.
but I think it's more important to care what apps are [b]useable[/b]. Mix beauty and functionality into a big soup bowl, and rate them accordingly. Just rating apps on their look is as redundant as underpants on a Saint Bernard.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
I just switched my Powerbook to Ubuntu. So, now I get the added advantage of no composite video out and other 'goodies'. I'm tempted to switch back, but I really don't like Aqua (apart from the look).
Max.
Or maybe he's commenting on how the general lack of style in the geek community tends to make apps look like shit. That, and there's no BigMeanCorporation to enforce a HIG on linux apps, so it's a relative free-for-all UI-wise. That's great for a limited human-interaction interface like a CLI where app-interaction is king, but a GUI suffers when it lacks continuity and unification. GUI's just aren't about app-stacking. They're for human interaction, and commonly-understood guidelines make them more usable.
Linux alone is forever a server, never a desktop. Linux with a HIG stands a chance against Mac OS and Windows in the desktop space. And no, a window manager is not a HIG.
Dude, I love you! Nobody ever writes et cetera using the & ligature... I avoid it myself just because not many seem to know what it means. Anyway, nice to see it being used.
Ahem... errr... okay, now I feel kinda awkward...
Bye bye... *runs away*
Yar.
It's been said above but I think it deserves more than one mention.
I cackled with glee as I deleted the atrocious Yahoo Messenger from my Mac. AdiumX is one of the only perfect apps I have used in my 21 years of computing.
My niece stood on my once beloved Dell 8200 the other day and cracked the LCD. I said, "era, what the hell...".
http://adiumx.com/screenshots.php
I'm always finding new capabilites with Quicksilver. It transforms the way you work with your Mac, and it is beautiful in its minimalism and polish. This is a tool that does so much, and actually does so while not only staying out of your way, but also by removing obstacles to flow. Quicksilver gets my vote for #1.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I feel a little sad about that list, as it contains no academic applications at all. No physical simulations. No Latin verb conjugators. No statistical calculators. Are there none around, or are they all ugly? Or are they simply outside the journalists sphere of interest?
I missed my most favorite RSS-reader Vienna: fast, small, FREE, compatible with NewsNetWire (as in: very easily transfer all your favorite streams, and never look back).
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
However, I do still use and appreciate some of these apps. xterm is still the best terminal emulator, and xpdf is still the best PDF viewer. When in command-line mode, mplayer is great.
Hands in my pocket
Printing is special? I rarely (read: never) use X11 apps in OS X, but I'd just assumed that since OS X's printing system is CUPS, which is become the de facto printer queue on Unix-like systems, and includes analogues of older tools (lpr, lpq, etc.), that printing under X11 would Just Work (assuming, of course, that you've set up your printer in OS X). Am I wrong?
Just my two cents... X11 apps are a distant third choice for me behind native and java apps. For small utilities I'd prefer a CLI interface. For larger, more complex utilities, the misplaced menu, lack of support for services, and other UI inconsistencies you don't think about till you hit them are just too detrimental to my workflow. I never use drag and drop, except for the occasional image so it is not a big deal to me.
Do not assume, however, that lack of negative feedback means everyone likes something. Either do real testing and surveying or be very cognizant of the fact that you don't know. Personally, I've never written a software developer and told them I was unhappy about the X11 GUI. That would seem rude, given they spent the time porting the app. I just shrug and look for an alternative application.
Seriously, have you ever used Gnome or KDE? They aren't just window managers.
My Gnome desktop in Ubuntu is probably more unified than my Mac or Windows desktops. Consider Windows: The Media Player sticks out like a sore thumb, and Office doesn't conform to anything but itself. (Actually I don't use Office, but I can't let that stand in the way of a rhetorical point.) And in Mac OS X, the apps can't agree on whether they want to be Pinstriped, Brushed, or Unified.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Designing a piece of art icon has some consequences. If you check Transmit icon there even if you don't use OS X, it will look familiar to you.
http://www.panic.com/transmit/
That thing is one of the most stolen icons of all time. They even put a page dedicated to "rip off"
http://www.panic.com/extras/ripoff/
Note many sites fixed their stolen icons after figuring it out. Yes, it is usually a burglar single webmaster to blame. I personally know one of them got fired who should knaw Panic Inc. and Transmit icon 6 months ago because of the site he "designs".
BTW if you don't use OS X, don't get tricked by how eye candy and easy looking those programs are. They are eye candy code wise too. It is not like "code must suck so they made it look beautiful". They are very advanced, elite coded modern applications which really fits good to year 2006 and the OS X they run on.
Yes, exactly.
As an illustration, I avoid using my very own application if I can help it under OS/X, because it so doesn't fit with the rest of the desktop. I wrote it with a portable toolkit (FLTK) that doesn't require X11, but still looks like one. It doesn't work well with all the rest of OS/X. I painfully got D&D working, I think I can get the menus sort-of worked out, but this is not good enough.
I know some clients use it, I never had negative feedback, but based on my own opinion they can't possibly love it. If the author doesn't like his own creation, what hope is there ?