Re: RFC: UI design

[Jan Jokela <janjokela gmail com>]

On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 6:28 PM, Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com> wrote:

On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 1:15 PM, Jan Jokela <janjokela gmail com> wrote:

> The way I see this issue is that OS X applications are all across the board
> much superior to GTK+ Apps both from an aesthetic and user experience point
> of view. And any solution that doesn't really solve the problem is a bad
> solution.

2 quick points there.

1) although i broadly agree about the comparison, its not true when
you get down into the details of every widget, let alone window
management. but the biggest thing about the OS X experience is its
cohesiveness and that's hard to achieve without a not-necessarily
benign dictator, something GTK does not have and probably cannot have.

2) there are plenty of apps in my domain (pro-audio/music creation
software) which do *not* use the native toolkit on OS X or Windows
(they use openGL or JUCE, typically), and they don't strive for native
appearance. even the ones that do use Cocoa tend to use an additional
set of widgets that apple makes available for "pro apps". if you take
a look at an apple application like Logic, it only has about 70-80% of
the "feel" of an OS X application.  not sure what this all means, but
i don't think its nothing.

And that's the point. Apple's Pro apps such as Final Cut Pro X are a good example of iconic applications. 

And building those require two things from the toolkit: 

1 - Ability to style individual widgets to achieve a very distinctive feel by applying a custom color palette, textures and so on. But for the App to be cohesive with the platform, the theme (the design and usability features of widgets) must remain identical.

2 - Be able to easily create custom widgets. I'm not a Cocoa developer so I'm not familiar with the widget set Apple provides for creative Apps but having custom widget sets require a default theme, otherwise there's a risk of those widgets feeling completely out of pace with the rest of the App and the platform.

Jan.