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!"
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...
Argh! My eyes...
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
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.
... 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.
I can't really tell if this is a troll or not.
Anyway, I think you're way off base. There's no "copying Windows freeware concepts and selling them as crippleware" going on here. None.
There are a host of free Mac Bittorrent clients out there -- this is what the GP was alluding to when he was saying that he wasn't going to pay $18 for Transmit. Azureus, for one, runs fine on OS X and doesn't cost anything.
The complaint about Transmit is that what you're essentially paying $18 for is not the functionality, but the interface.
So really, I'd argue the on the Mac platform, you generally have a choice: do you want to use the spartan-but-functional-and-free program (often a port from another platform, if not a direct recompile), or do you want to pay extra for the eye candy? Perhaps there's something about Mac users that makes them more likely to value appearance enough to pay for it, and keep such a cottage 'beautification' industry in business.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
Uno does a pretty good job at unifying everything to be more Aqua-ish.
...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.
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.
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.
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