Almost all applications are either for the iPhone or for the Mac. I also notice and appreciate the sophistication of a lot of these kind of programs. I still enjoy Tweetie's awesome iPhone UI every day I use it.
I like the focus on desktop/mobile apps, there already are plenty of "pretty website" aggregators around (see CSSRemix etc.).
I also like the selection, most of these apps do indeed look awesome. If you know a good-looking win/lin/android program then why not submit it to him?
This really does seem to be a big problem in the Windows world. Apple has a pretty clear design aesthetic for OS X that they carry through to a lot of the applications they write as well. That's given the developer/designer community a great base to start from. A lot of the 3rd party applications are tweaks of the general aesthetic that Apple provides to start with and they end up looking great. I don't mean to imply that the people creating OS X applications aren't talented, but Apple has sure helped them by providing a solid foundation. As a developer I can go into Xcode and put together and easily put together an interface that looks both very modern and well designed (whitespace, colors, etc).
Contrast that with Windows (I do most of my coding on Windows) where the application development tools let you easily create what is pretty much a Windows 95 style application. If I want to do something more modern looking, I certainly can, but I will be on my own to basically override existing controls to come up with my own look and feel. Also, I will be creating this look and feel from scratch as Microsoft has provided no starting point.
Microsoft theoretically has provided the tools to create great looking resolution independent applications with WPF, but until they start providing some examples of what the Windows aesthetic really is through their own applications, you won't see many great looking applications on Windows.
That's one of the first things that surprised me when I started fiddling with OSX programming. Interface Builder is so ridiculously easy to use, an angry monkey could make something that's relatively HID-compliant. The guides are accurate and informative, even the first time you encounter them, and just chucking controls onto a panel with a little organization and letting them fall where they snap will get you 90%+ of the way there.
WPF looks interesting, and I like a lot of it, but * ick *, XML. What is it with Microsoft and XML? HAML's popularity should be some hint as to how much people hate HTML, XML is worse.
Very true. That seems to be the pattern though. The few nice looking applications for Windows are mostly cross platform and have an aesthetic that is unique to that one application. On OS X there are a lot of 3rd party applications that you can describe as feeling like a Mac application. I don't really get that same feeling about anything on Windows.
There are definitely some, but a quick glance at a random X programs will convince you that Apple's products have a relative monopoly on design-centric applications. Except web apps, some of those are really impressive.
I fully expect this to gain more focus on Windows & Linux, and it has had a significant impact already. But other platforms are far more polluted by old, nasty looking software than OSX & iPhone, and Apple pretty much started the current trend towards better GUI design, despite there clearly being a desire in the market for it for a long time.
I'd have liked to see at least one from those categories, but it would be much more difficult. I have several applications on my Mac that could fit in that post, and I have never had one on Windows, despite having used literally several thousand Windows applications. Some design-centric, but none beautiful (a custom interface does not necessarily mean it's a good one). Sure, some have been shiny / beautiful in locations A, B, and C, but none all the way through to Z. There has always been several massive oversights that break with the small fluid goodness.
All of this is excluding games, of course. Games are generally well and "completely" designed on all platforms pretty equally (sans iPhone).
edit: oh, forgot to add. I'd be very interested in what other HN people can find out there on Win/Linux. I've seen very little, but I haven't looked for it very much.
