Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces
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Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces
#21. 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...
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.
Re: Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces
#31. 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... 3. Sparrow. These are not OS X toolbar icons…
I agree with #6. Also I was so used with having the Cmd+J keyboard shortcut for "Edit with ..".
Re: Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces
#41. 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... 3. Sparrow. These are not OS X toolbar icons…
2. I don't get how that invalidates Reeder in any way? Seems like a minor niggle ("buttons should be larger").
Re: Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces
#5I 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/
Re: Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces
#6Daisy 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.
Re: Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces
#71. 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... 3. Sparrow. These are not OS X toolbar icons…
2. I don't get how that invalidates Reeder in any way? Seems like a minor niggle ("buttons should be larger").
Yeah, I can't really get with that analysis since I've dropped both NetNewsWire and the Google Reader web interface in favor of Reeder. It's short a few keyboard shortcuts but otherwise it's a lovely app to use.
Re: Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces
#8The 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.
Re: Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
2. I don't get how that invalidates Reeder in any way? Seems like a minor niggle ("buttons should be larger").
Yeah, I can't really get with that analysis since I've dropped both NetNewsWire and the Google Reader web interface in favor of Reeder. It's short a few keyboard shortcuts but otherwise it's a lovely app to use.
I’m not sure you should put beta software on such lists, either, but the analysis seems very superficial, even after reading it again. Fitt’s law is important but he seems to be barking up the wrong tree. Small buttons are not at all uncommon on the Mac. It’s not an iOS thing.
Safari’s default toolbar buttons (Back, Add Bookmark, …) have actually a smaller clickable area than Reeder’s buttons (about 800 square pixels vs. about 1300 square pixels) and if you overshoot the utterly unimportant Back button your mouse is right above the Close button. Depending on the size of the text label, Mail’s and Preview’s default toolbar buttons have about the same area as Reeder’s. OS X relic TextEdit has just as small toolbar buttons as Safari.
The minimum size for standard toolbar buttons on OS X is about 800 square pixels, the maximum (and default) is about 1800 square pixels. Reeder falls somewhere between those two and is certainly not some weird outlier because of that, if only because so many apps for the Mac, whether they are from Apple or other developers, have had the smallest toolbar buttons (smaller than Reeder’s default buttons) as a default for a long time.
I’m not saying that small buttons are a good idea, I don’t know that. All I’m saying that picking out Reeder and identifying iOS as the culprit seems misguided.
Re: Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces
#10The 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…
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.