I'm not sure how you can call any of this "Mac App Design". To boot, none of it follows Apple's interface guidelines. At all. And beyond that, none of them can be using standard Cocoa UI elements. So they're all highly unfeasible.
Beyond that, none of them are good. It probably seems harsh to say that, but none of these really do any important thinking about how interfaces are supposed to work. Design isn't just making stuff pretty, it's making stuff work well. Most if not all of these apps are basically a fresh coat of paint on an existing product or the envisioning of a new product as it is similar to the current form.
To summarize:
- None of them look like Mac apps
- All of their interfaces are superficial
- Most of their interfaces are difficult to replicate in the native Mac development environment without extensive custom work
- None of them actually exist beyond being pictures!
How do you know that any of these ideas are actually good without trying them? A picture's worth a thousand words, but if it looks better than it works it's worth a huge loss in customers.
Sorry if this sounds grumpy, I just don't really understand the point of this at all. Everyone who's interested in pie-in-the-sky conceptual app designs that are more focused on eye candy than usability has dribbble already.
My favorite is the completely illegible IM concept with nearly-invisible white text over a bright green (#3EFF8C) background. I suppose if I'm really prone to saying things I regret, I might find it useful not to be reminded of anything I've ever said...
I was just about to say this looks just like literally everything you see on dribble, checking each link on the site - all but two were actually links to it.
The title is a bit off - this isn't so much a blog of Mac app design as a blog of speculative Mac app UI concepts.
Some of them are quite nice in purely visual terms, but they tend to lack any rigorous UX thought. The Slack one is a perfect example: Yes, putting the channels, direct messages, and private groups into their own tabs looks neater, but now I would have to click twice instead of once each time I switched between the two channels I use most often.
Apparently a mobile app becomes a Mac app when you add the "traffic light" window controls to the top-left corner.
What particularly irritates me is that these concepts show tiny little apps floating on an empty desktop. Which Mac user has a single app running at a time?
In the real world, a Mac app will be overlaid on top of dozens of other windows. And then all those blur backgrounds turn into grey smudges, because the content of the underlying windows is mostly text.
Most of these concepts irritate me to no end by such enormous amount of wasted whitespace. May be it's an irrational thing (after all, personally I usually work with a pair of 1680x and 4k monitors and have no shortage of pixels), but I just don't get it: why use all these gigantic margins and spaces when instead UX designer could've just made the window smaller?
The thoughtful use of white space (a.k.a. negative space) can improve readability/scannability, and to guide users by helping to create a visual relationship between various UI elements.
Cosmetically, generous negative space can help create a feeling of sophistication and elegance. I suspect that this kind of use is more offensive to practical people who have little use for how something "feels".
And of course sometimes it's overdone by designers, especially in cases of concepts serving as shiny, happy portfolio fodder instead of serving real users and business goals.
Whitespace can improve readability, but only up to a point. The Slack concept currently at the top of the list would fit less than a minute's worth of conversation in a moderately busy Slack channel, so the increased readability of individual messages comes at the cost of dramatically decreased readability of the conversation as a whole.
I agree with this. In addition, these designs all center themselves around app-specific themes, which is unfortunate because (at least IMO) one of the biggest benefits of a native desktop app is that it conforms to the system's look and feel by using standard widgets. Throwing that out the window in favor of style seems wasteful.
The desktop apps that impress me most are those with designs that create beauty through the stock system look and feel.
The best design is something that combines the native look and feel with a dash of style. You don't have to be 100% native UI elements, just very close to it.
While these designs looks good, I would absolutely not use any of them, as the _usability_ is non-existing. This also describes well why the designs doesn't follow Apple's HIG.
Contrary to the other feedback you seem to be getting, these are really nice - thanks for sharing!
I wonder if people are maybe missing that these are concepts and not fully developed designs, so they aren't perfect. It's like a concept car: there are ideas and themes that will make it to production, even though there would be extensive changes to productionise them. And that's pretty useful to see.
Okay, I'll bite :) I was hoping to get some inspiration, but it's a website full of identikit flat designs. What are the designers going to do a year or two from now when "Flat Design Considered Harmful" articles start filling up the front page of HN.
Recognizing there are a lot of opinions on Mac app design/visuals/etc., if you have any suggestions for future posts feel free to send them to desktopfruit@gmail.com.
Beyond that, none of them are good. It probably seems harsh to say that, but none of these really do any important thinking about how interfaces are supposed to work. Design isn't just making stuff pretty, it's making stuff work well. Most if not all of these apps are basically a fresh coat of paint on an existing product or the envisioning of a new product as it is similar to the current form.
To summarize:
- None of them look like Mac apps
- All of their interfaces are superficial
- Most of their interfaces are difficult to replicate in the native Mac development environment without extensive custom work
- None of them actually exist beyond being pictures!
How do you know that any of these ideas are actually good without trying them? A picture's worth a thousand words, but if it looks better than it works it's worth a huge loss in customers.
Sorry if this sounds grumpy, I just don't really understand the point of this at all. Everyone who's interested in pie-in-the-sky conceptual app designs that are more focused on eye candy than usability has dribbble already.