My Dream App

Gauguin and Manet Jello Wrestle

Paul of Rogue Amoeba recently wrote an article about a stylistic schism developing in the Mac software community. I’m going to be talking about it, so go read it. Seriously. It’s interesting, and you’ll learn some Italian, too!

My Lawn - Stay off, Damned Kids

Back? Cool. I agree with some of Paul’s thoughts, and they mimic similar thinking I’ve been doing myself over the last couple of years. But strongly I disagree that it’s any sort of a problem.

Whenever you get a critical mass of people together working on something creative, you get a similar process: A bunch of people do things one way. Later, a bunch of other people come along and do things a different way. The first group tells the damned kids to get off the first group’s lawn, while the second group declaims the rigidity of the first group and says they will never turn into the first group. Dame Fashion, she is indeed a fickle bitch.

Hey, Waitress Intent On Destroying Civilization - Where’s my Absinthe Latte?

When the Impressionists came along, the Renaissance painters thought it was the end of civilization. The Cubists totally freaked when the Dadaists began doing their thing. Your grandmother thinks rock’n'roll came straight from Satan. Your great-grandmother thinks the same about Yazz (I think it’s a soft “j”).

The point I’m laboriously beating you over the head with is that with historical perspective, it’s clear that a stylistic shift in the way that Mac software is written means only that the Mac software ecosphere is alive and healthy. So we should be pleased.

The Wherefores And Whytos

Here’s what’s caused the shift: Apple. Apple has gone through 42 window styles in the past five years. Apple does not use their own standard user interface elements, eschewing them for custom shiny ones. Apple released the aborted fetus of a UI that is Garage Band (I liked it at the time, it needs some botox and implants now). What the Mothership does tends to trickle down to the rest of the armada, and the change in UI conventions is the result.

The Carrot Top of UI Design

A lesser effect is the adoption of the Cocoa APIs. Using Cocoa makes programming a useable application significantly easier than it’s been in the past, and as a result, more people are writing Mac apps, and the authors have more time to spend on bling for their homeys, dawg.

An even lesser effect is the broadened demographics of Mac users that has come with the renaissance of the platform as a whole. More people are using Macs, and a lot of those people are completely non-technical. They want shiny pretty stuff that’s easy to use and makes them go “oooh!”.

And finally, yes, Delicious Library. Wil and Mike took every computer science major’s first demo app (a media catalogue) and made it pretty, nay, delicious, and it’s sold like hotcakes ever since. Other programmers look at that and go, “hey, old ideas are salable today if I actually make them useable and fun!”

All of these factors combine to make increased aesthetics at the cost of consistency a nearly inescapable social phenomena.

Chain Smoking

Paul goes on to mention a bunch of stuff that I’m personally involved in, and while he’s not overtly hostile towards them, one gets the impression he doesn’t think much of them overall. But I think he’s missing the point. Take, for example, Disco, for which I wrote the Smoke effects. Paul quotes some unnamed entity as saying that the Smoke “is now infamous for being a sign of the fall of the Mac”. Good Lordikins! I hope I’m not going to need a bodyguard… (assassination attempts by beautiful supermodel arch-villains only, please!).

Delectable Roxio Developers

I’ll be the first to agree that the Smoke is superfluous (by design), but I disagree that Disco itself is simple. It’s not at all - even though it shares functionality with other solutions, it’s workflow is superb. It makes a boring task that can be difficult for neophyte computer users fun and simple. Since neophyte computer users are the target market, making it pretty and fun serves as a form of additional psychological branding and as such, is completely warranted.

Finally, I think that sniping at the phrase “We’re having Toast for breakfast” is just petty. I don’t think the Disco team is literally planning on, you know, driving over to Roxio headquarters and frying themselves up a nice breakfast burrito of Toast developers. Toast is one of their competitors and it’s a cute, fun, marketing statement. Nothing more.

All In The Eye Of The Beholder

Paul goes on to say “Without getting too many nastygrams, I hope I can say that these applications are a bit light on content.” I’m not sure whether he’s referring to My Dream App or not, but this complaint has been leveled at the My Dream App winners quite a few times, and it’s really a strange complaint to me.

Out of the six finalists, three were frequently and publicly criticized as being too complex to ever actually implement! So which is it? Are they too simple to be worthwhile, or are they impossibly complex? To me, they’re worthwhile apps if for no other reason than that people can’t decide whether they’re trivial or insane.

A good programmer should strive to hide complexity if the user does not need to be exposed to it (which is almost always the case). All three MDA winners pose complex programming challenges. If the final results appear simple, that’s great - we’ve done our jobs well!

Wait, A Thesis!?

Susumu’s resume

So that brings me finally, 46 paragraphs in, to my thesis. If you plan to sell Mac software to non-technical users, and you plan on doing it in the latter half of the first decade of the 21st century, you’d better make it drop-dead simple to use, and you’d better make it visually appealing and fun.

So, you!, at the small Mac developer office! Hire a graphic designer, seriously.

And if you’re a graphic designer working on the Mac platform, it’s time for you to sharpen up that resume and start getting some contacts in the developer community, especially if you’ve been making ShapeShifter themes like these guys. Your services are going to be in demand.

Want to fuel the flames? Digg it.