> Besides the fact that cocoa on mac has evolved over a decade
Arguably longer -- Cocoa itself goes back to NextStep in the mid-90s, and the Mac focus on UX goes back a decade before that.
But, I don't think it's just the books -- starting with the NextStep era, the tooling (Xcode and, before that, Interface Builder) was part of it, and the whole "follow the Human Interface Guidelines" ethos going back to the 68K Mac days genuinely created a culture of UI-obsessed nerds, not just inside Apple but in the whole third-party developer ecosystem, that I haven't seen anywhere else. While I genuinely don't think it's fair to say that open source developers don't care, they don't care at the same level that the Mac historically has, and you see that in all sorts of tiny little details that seem individually inconsequential -- like the "broken by design" folder selection you describe above -- but collectively add up.
Well, I'll back off the "haven't seen anywhere else" a bit; I met a couple folks working on Qt when I was at Nokia circa 2010, and they seemed to be that level of deeply involved opinionated UX nerd. (Which genuinely surprised me, I confess, because my impression of Qt before starting there was…maybe not the best?) But it's not something I saw carried through by third-party Qt developers outside Nokia/Trolltech.
One could make a good case that Apple's taken their eye off the ball in terms of UX over the last few years, making unforced form-over-function errors and biffing aesthetic details in ways one suspects they just wouldn't have a decade ago. Even so, there's a cohesion to the design that I don't generally feel on other platforms. I'm not convinced the "convergence" that the linked article described is the way to go to address this, either. (As others have pointed out, the apps Apple makes using their own "convergence-focused" toolkits like Catalyst have tended to be their wiggiest.)
Yes MacOS and Cocoa is just Nextstep. Not only are the classes called NSSomething, but there is a presentation from early 90ies of the dev environment by Steve Jobs and the Interface Builder etc look very similar to Xcode.
Arguably longer -- Cocoa itself goes back to NextStep in the mid-90s, and the Mac focus on UX goes back a decade before that.
But, I don't think it's just the books -- starting with the NextStep era, the tooling (Xcode and, before that, Interface Builder) was part of it, and the whole "follow the Human Interface Guidelines" ethos going back to the 68K Mac days genuinely created a culture of UI-obsessed nerds, not just inside Apple but in the whole third-party developer ecosystem, that I haven't seen anywhere else. While I genuinely don't think it's fair to say that open source developers don't care, they don't care at the same level that the Mac historically has, and you see that in all sorts of tiny little details that seem individually inconsequential -- like the "broken by design" folder selection you describe above -- but collectively add up.
Well, I'll back off the "haven't seen anywhere else" a bit; I met a couple folks working on Qt when I was at Nokia circa 2010, and they seemed to be that level of deeply involved opinionated UX nerd. (Which genuinely surprised me, I confess, because my impression of Qt before starting there was…maybe not the best?) But it's not something I saw carried through by third-party Qt developers outside Nokia/Trolltech.
One could make a good case that Apple's taken their eye off the ball in terms of UX over the last few years, making unforced form-over-function errors and biffing aesthetic details in ways one suspects they just wouldn't have a decade ago. Even so, there's a cohesion to the design that I don't generally feel on other platforms. I'm not convinced the "convergence" that the linked article described is the way to go to address this, either. (As others have pointed out, the apps Apple makes using their own "convergence-focused" toolkits like Catalyst have tended to be their wiggiest.)