[rbritton]

1. wunderlist. How is this beautiful? They crammed a wood-styled UI into OS X's standard window chrome. The toggle switches at the bottom are not the OS-provided ones and look like they're intended to match the iPhone app more than the OS they're running on. Things is a far better example here.

2. Reeder. See http://danielkennett.org/blog/2010/12/analysing-a-touch-to-d...

3. Sparrow. These are not OS X toolbar icons -- they're UIKit icons! They look as out-of-place on OS X as OS X ones would on an iOS device.

5. DaisyDisk. The UI here is very unique and usable. The mouse-over support on the file graph is actually very, very useful for determining where storage space is being used.

6. Transmit 4. I personally found Transmit 3's favorites interface and syncing interface to be more usable. The animations they've added slow down use and some buttons (e.g., disconnect) are far harder to reach than in T3.

7. Courier. While the interface is novel and interesting at first glance, I have to question how useful it is for repetitive tasks. I have not used the app, so I can't comment there, but more often than not fancy graphics get in the way of speed.

8. 1Password. This one I love. It's useful and very usable. I've used multiple versions of this program and the UI changes they've made with the current one far outshine the previous versions both in terms of appearance and usability.

My only gripe still would be with the browser plugin. I've tried setting up other less computer-savvy people to use it, and the menu does not make it immediately obvious to them which item to select to log in -- the top several options are too crammed together visually.

[lmz]

4. It's not that unique, is it? I used KDE's FileLight[1][2] some years ago and it had that same visualization.

[1]: http://www.methylblue.com/filelight/

[2]: http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=9887

[burgerbrain]

Exactly, and FileLight was hardly the first to have it either. This sort of disk usage visualization is quite old.

[smashing]

Every time I see the wood interface, I think of Radio Shack and Tandy circa 1970's.

[Derbasti]

Only of course, Daisy Disk actually animates beautifully. Have you ever seen it in action? Its animations really bring it to life.

[ugh]

2. I don't get how that invalidates Reeder in any way? Seems like a minor niggle ("buttons should be larger").

[sjs]

And in a better spot. I'm not that thrilled about Reeder for Mac even though I love it on my iPhone and iPad, and a lot of it is due to the awkward position of the share button and such. The UI is really good looking but not usable enough.

[ugh]

That’s what I didn’t understand. NetNewWire has buttons on the exact same position (http://netnewswireapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/mac_scr... – please note that NetNewsWire doesn’t even show an Unread or Flag button by default), why then is Reeder’s placement especially bad?

It’s also not like the edges of the App help you a lot. Mac apps are at least by default not fullscreen, putting buttons in the corners doesn’t make sure that your mouse will be stopped by the edge of the screen right above or in close proximity to the button.

[kiiski]

> That’s what I didn’t understand. NetNewWire has buttons on the exact same position (http://netnewswireapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/mac_scr.... – please note that NetNewsWire doesn’t even show an Unread or Flag button by default), why then is Reeder’s placement especially bad?

NetNewsWire has the window titlebar above the toolbar. Reeder has those two combined in one bar (so there is less vertical space).

[ugh]

Yes, I read that, too. Seems like a dicy hypothesis to me. I would like to see some user testing.

[wahnfrieden]

It seems that this is why the next OS X will feature special full-screen application UI, to take advantage of things like Fitt's law, instead of encouraging people to maximize windows.

[tvon]

Yeah, I can't really get with that analysis since I've dropped both NetNewsWire and the Google Reader web interface in favor of Reeder. It's short a few keyboard shortcuts but otherwise it's a lovely app to use.

[ugh]

I’m not sure you should put beta software on such lists, either, but the analysis seems very superficial, even after reading it again. Fitt’s law is important but he seems to be barking up the wrong tree. Small buttons are not at all uncommon on the Mac. It’s not an iOS thing.

Safari’s default toolbar buttons (Back, Add Bookmark, …) have actually a smaller clickable area than Reeder’s buttons (about 800 square pixels vs. about 1300 square pixels) and if you overshoot the utterly unimportant Back button your mouse is right above the Close button. Depending on the size of the text label, Mail’s and Preview’s default toolbar buttons have about the same area as Reeder’s. OS X relic TextEdit has just as small toolbar buttons as Safari.

The minimum size for standard toolbar buttons on OS X is about 800 square pixels, the maximum (and default) is about 1800 square pixels. Reeder falls somewhere between those two and is certainly not some weird outlier because of that, if only because so many apps for the Mac, whether they are from Apple or other developers, have had the smallest toolbar buttons (smaller than Reeder’s default buttons) as a default for a long time.

I’m not saying that small buttons are a good idea, I don’t know that. All I’m saying that picking out Reeder and identifying iOS as the culprit seems misguided.

[sirn]

7. I have been using Courier for a while and found its interface to be less annoying than I thought it would. The envelop metaphor makes managing upload destination much more pleasant. You can also use Finder's contextual menu for repetitive uploads.

[huhtenberg]

> http://danielkennett.org/blog/2010/12/analysing-a-touch-to-d...

Jeez, where did you find this junk? Ridiculously lopsided and it reads like the Reeder's designer peed in author's morning coffee at some point.

> The user is moving towards those (quite small) buttons from a fair distance away, and are therefore likely to overshoot.

Likely to overshoot? Really? I take if buttons were larger, the user would just hit them with one flick of the wrist, no correction, not slowing down half way through, no undershooting or overshooting. Just one motion with a beautifully smooth acceleration curve every user is so striving for.

The app is optimized for better reading experience, and the blog guy makes no attempt to account for what the app's primary and routine usage is. It is - suprise - reading. Not clicking the buttons. Reading. Make buttons larger - and you just introduced extraneous visual noise and took away from the screen real estate in the app that (won't hurt repeating) is for reading.

> Someone came out with a Mac OS application that’s clearly a touch UI crowbarred into a point-and-click universe

Someone came out with a pretentious blog post crowbarred into a formal UX analysis format.

> This is NOT how to make Mac apps, guys.

And this is now not to... ah, nevermind.

[riobard]

Interesting. I've discussed that silly article last week in a mailing list. Here's the body of my post there:

I disagree. I've been using Reeder like crazy since the first beta is publicly released, and up till now my experience is: it is the best OS X app I've ever used. The UI is not flawless on a screen without touching, but it's the most efficient and elegant interface I've ever seen on a desktop app.

Complaining those little buttons are hard to reach is kinda pointless for two reasons:

1) It's secondary usage. One spends most of time in a feed reader scanning through headlines, or reading the actual content. How many times do you actually star an article? I don't believe I have a higher standards for articles, but I probably star 2~4 articles a day. Why do you want to clutter an elegant interface for such low value functionality? As for the management feature, sure you'll manage the feeds in Google Reader. Reeder is supposed to be just a, em, reader.

2) Those actions all have really really simple and easy to remember shortcuts. If you are a power user of feeds and you do a lot of unreading, starring, etc, the right way to do is to press the shortcut keys. M for marking un/read, S for starring. How hard is that?

What has Reeder got right as a feed reader, compared to, say, NetNewsWire or Google Reader? Layout and typography.

The 3-column layout is so much more efficient than the two-panel with right-panel split into headlines and body (a.k.a. Mail.app style). The left column to select categories and feed. This is the same in Reeder, NNW and GR. But the killer is the middle column.

In the headline views in both NNW and GR you get a single line to show the title and the first few words of a feed. This line is spanning too long horizontally, which makes it hard to scan through long lists of feeds due to the inability to quickly reposition visual focus back to the beginning of the next line. There is a reason why we have an “optimal line-width”.

In Reeder the middle column positions titles and the first few words vertically, which makes the line-width shorter (it has to make room for the right column anyway) and far easier to scan through. I believe this style is actually pioneered by Microsoft in Outlook. Look at any well-designed newspaper and you'll see the same design: narrow columns for quick scanning.

Plus, in NNW's Mail.app-style right column, the vertical screen asset for the actual feed content is significantly wasted when you want to read a long feed: by default more than half the vertical pixels are devoted to the headline view (although you can adjust this but then it conflicts with the headline view when scanning titles). Sure you can click and open a feed, but that extra one click kills efficiency. And because the content view is much wider, we get the same line-width issue before. Reeder's Outlook-style right column, being both taller and narrower, makes it much easier for reading feeds.

And don't even get me started on typography! In the official GR, the typography is basically a completely failure (as in nearly all Google products anyway). They don't even bother to provide a larger line-height! Reading in GR is just a painful experience.

[bradendouglass]

Am 100% onboard with the Wunderlist comment. I can't stand the ui/ux on this app. If you want to break things down, this app has an amazing design FOR something built on Titanium...that's about it.

[phalien]

I agree with #6. Also I was so used with having the Cmd+J keyboard shortcut for "Edit with ..".

[babeKnuth]

wunderlist allows you to change the background (i dislike the woody theme myself).

plus, wunderlist is open source:

https://github.com/6wunderkinder/wunderlist