Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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?
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."
... 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.
I must disagree. Firefox is easily the ugliest application ever created. And I say this even after trying dozens of skins. Not a single one of them comes close to the eloquence of the built-in "Aqua" appearance on Mac OS X.
Windows GUIs are ugly and disfunctional. Linux GUIs are ugly and semifunctional. OS X GUIs are pretty and functional.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
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.
Windows GUIs are ugly and functional. Linux GUIs are ugly and dysfunctional. OS X GUIs are pretty and functional.
There, fixed that for you...
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.
What's that about opinions and butts? Go ahead and label me a heretic, but I think Aqua has nothing on KDE's Plastik theme. The difference is that I just stated an opinion, while you pretended to state a fact.
Now here's a real fact (just to show the difference): some people have different tastes from yours. Don't forget that.
Oh, and one last while I'm being pedantic: it's "elegance", unless Aqua really speaks to you.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
I must disagree. Firefox is easily the ugliest application ever created.
Have you tried looking at some websites in it? That's what I usually do when I need a break from contemplating the aesthetic shortcomings of the interface.
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.
There are however some things that override taste when it comes to UIs, and that's functionality. There can be elegance in functionality and even beauty. Aqua (especially in it's unified form) encompasses all of this. While Plastik (my opinion based on screenshots screams yet another windows wannabe) might look superficially good to your tastes, it is also (very eloquently put) just a skin. A skin to a mediocre user experience compared to Aqua that is.
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
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.
Plain Windows GUI's are functional (the pre-XP and "Classic Theme" ones). The Fischer-Price GUI and those god-awful "branded" UI's (custom window shapes, colors, widgets, etc) are what are non-functional (not even dysfunctional, since that would mean they kinda almost function). Microsoft has a HIG, and if they would follow it, so would most of their platform's major app vendors. Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to have no internal organizational discipline about this sort of thing. They come off as a corporation with an attitude like a kid in a candy store. They want one of those, and one of those, and ooh! one of those over there, and no, wait, not that... but one of those... They just never make up their mind about how it should look. Vista is another example of it, since it's the second major UI overhaul in as many major releases. Oddly enough, the users tend to be either silent or ignored (or both).
/. user name.)
Linux GUI's are inconsistent, which makes them unusable for the exact same reason as the horrible deviant Windows GUI's. That said, the community tends to bust the devs' balls when they can't tolerate the UI (like GIMP). The community tends to not be very picky, though. Only the worst offenders even hear a peep of a complaint. It would help if there was a community HIG.
Mac apps live and die by the GUI. If they don't follow the Apple HIG, there has to be a really good reason for it, or people won't use the app. A popular app with a bad UI is just begging to be relegated to the trash can within a year, since another dev will copy the good parts of their app and give it a decent GUI. And a developer of an app can't help but hear the complaints if he has a bad UI. There's not a chance in hell you can shut up a Mac user about their precious UI. (Before you flame me, look at my
In short, a HIG makes all the difference. It's a statement of how a UI is supposed to work and what is to be expected by the user and provided by the developer. Linux needs 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
Hmm, it's hard to see how anyone can claim Firefox is ugly in any sense. It's minimalist, uncluttered, intuitive and attractive. It even works fairly well on OS X since it picks up the native look & feel through the theme engine.
Since you're being bashed all the way through the children posts, let me back up your opinion: Firefox is ugly as hell, especially in OS X.
It doesn't fit into the look and feel of the native apps, even the best skins still look like hastily scrapped together icon collections. I use Firefox as my main browser (goes to show that I am not too picky about the eye candy) but would really appreciate if someone sat down and at least created a decent skin. Better still (because that would allow us to get rid of the stupid window title bar as well), create an OS X - only version of Firefox that has a look comparable to the current iTunes and all the other Tiger apps.
To one of the children posters: Well, yeah, this is all about opinions. Of course it is. No need to point that out like you just discovered a deep philosophical truth, since we're posting to a story about "the 10 most beautiful OS X apps"...
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?
Not exactly sure why my post was rated 'off topic'....strange. Aqua effects the 'beauty' (visual and otherwise) of all OS X apps (well, I suppose an X11 app could be called an OS X app, but I don't think that's what they mean).
Max.
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.
I assume you meant "elegance". Anyway, what you want is one of the GrApple themes from http://takebacktheweb.org/ . You can't tell me with a straight face that Firefox with an appropriate GrApple theme looks any worse than Safari.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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 ?
I certainly can. Looks are skin deep. The problem with Firefox's themes are much deeper than that -- I'm pretty sure the problems are in the theme engine itself.
Looks may be skin deep, but they're what we're talking about here. Do you want to rephrase that?
What problems do you perceive in the themes?
Have you actually tried a GrApple theme?
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Yeah, I'm using one. It has a bunch of cosmetic-only problems, but more importantly some functional ones:
1. It doesn't draw focuses properly, so it can be difficult to tell where the cursor is.
2. Context menus are drawn too small and can be hard to read, and do not respond properly to the mouse.
3. The Loaded indicator doesn't look any different than the loading in progress indicator, so it can be difficult to tell when a page is fully loaded.
4. Dragging text doesn't work correctly.
It's definitely the best of the Firefox themes, and the artwork is definitely inspired by Aqua. However, its designers seem to have missed a lot of stuff that exists for a reason.
There are absolutes in interface design. Not many, but some. For instance, focus rings around controls that edit text. Text that's large enough to be easy to read. Applications that fit with system themes unless there's a reason for them not to --not only in appearance, but in behavior. Enough interface aid from applications to protect their users. Some of these things can go into grey areas, certainly, but their presence or absence are still facts and not opinions.