Show HN: Desktop Fruit – A Curated Blog of Mac App Design
desktopfruit.com
desktopfruit.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.
Regardless of viability, they are original. Throw away what doesn't work, savage what does, good to get the creative juices flowing.
I personally find wire framing and loose brainstorming much more effective than creating detailed mockups like these to crete good designs, but YMMV.
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.
The background transparency is nice looking as long as you're not actively using your computer for anything and don't have any windows open.
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.
The desktop apps that impress me most are those with designs that create beauty through the stock system look and feel.
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.
Concepts are a dime a dozen and while these are nice pieces of art I can't really take them seriously as App designs.
Focus on real products and the people making them.
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.