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Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces

designshack.co.uk

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Re: Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces

#31

Post by bradendouglass »

riobard wrote: post #24
callahad wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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!

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.

Re: Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces

#32

Post by 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.

Re: Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces

#35

Post by leif »

tumult wrote: post #8

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…

Get your downvoting fingers ready... ;-)

AL-motherf###ing-PINE

I swear, I've tried to get in to gui mail apps. I even got pretty far once with gmail's offline mode. I've tried so damn hard, but I can't stay away from alpine. It's so fast, so small, I never have to look for anything. All the commands are staring me in the face at all times. You cannot ask for a better UI.

[p.s. how do you emit literal asterisks here, I've never run across this problem before?]

Re: Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces

#37

Post by smashing »

burgerbrain wrote: post #21
lmz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Re: Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces

#38

Post by ugh »

sjs wrote: post #22
ugh wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2. I don't get how that invalidates Reeder in any way? Seems like a minor niggle ("buttons should be larger").

And in a better spot. I'm not that thrilled about Reeder for Mac even though I love it on my iPhone and iPad, and a lot of it is due to the awkward position of the share button and such. The UI is really good looking but not usable enough.

That’s what I didn’t understand. NetNewWire has buttons on the exact same position (http://netnewswireapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/mac_scr... – please note that NetNewsWire doesn’t even show an Unread or Flag button by default), why then is Reeder’s placement especially bad?

It’s also not like the edges of the App help you a lot. Mac apps are at least by default not fullscreen, putting buttons in the corners doesn’t make sure that your mouse will be stopped by the edge of the screen right above or in close proximity to the button.

Re: Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces

#39

Post by Derbasti »

lmz wrote: post #18
rbritton wrote: post #2

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... 3. Sparrow. These are not OS X toolbar icons…

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

Only of course, Daisy Disk actually animates beautifully. Have you ever seen it in action? Its animations really bring it to life.

Re: Mac Apps With Beautiful Interfaces

#40

Post by Derbasti »

callahad wrote: post #10
tumult wrote: post #8

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…

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.

I'll trade processor time for usability any time. As long as animations don't get choppy or the app starts to feel sluggish or battery drain skyrockets, I couldn't care less if an app is using a lot of processor time.

Actually, Skype is a good example of how to not do it. Having Skype run in the background decreases my battery life by a good quarter. Actually talking to someone over Skype can easily get the laptop fans going. Skype even freezes for a few moments every now and then. And Skype is still a tremendously useful app, so I will even take this abuse. (The new design of the Skype beta for Mac is a different matter, though)

Sparrow on the other hand is smooth sailing.

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