[Aaronontheweb]

I think it's something of a faulty premise - both platforms have UI design guidelines (Ribbon interface, Chrome, etc...) - Apple's are more extensive IMHO, but that's a developer guidance issue and not a platform capability issue.

I think the perception of comes from a bunch of legacy Win32 apps that are still lingering around which have the crusty old design.

Newer apps made on Windows using WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) look great - like the Zune client, Visual Studio, Expression Blend, and third party apps like MetroTwit and Paint.NET. WPF uses a mark-up language to build UI elements and is thus more designer-friendly than WinForms and older Windows UI technologies - this fact in combination with the Aero UI leads to more elegant-looking Windows apps imho.

Apple has a longer-history of offering designer-friendly tools and UI guidelines to go with it, so that's probably where the perception comes from, but I'd argue it's a dated premise now.

[rchowe]

The thing about WPF apps is that none of visual studio, expression blend, or the zune client use a standard windows UI – cocoa makes it fairly easy to create an app that looks like xcode, and WPF seems that it makes it easy to style controls in a CSS fashion (I don't know; I haven't used it). I'd prefer consistency, even ugly consistency, over something nonstandard. Apple's gotten a little lax about this... see app store and iTunes.

[Aaronontheweb]

Rchowe, I agree with your criticism actually. The ribbon UI is really the only thing that's standard other than the parts of the experience enforced by the Aero engine itself.

One of the things I like about making WP7 apps are the Metro UI guidelines - it makes it a lot easier to build great looking applications when you have to follow conventions in order to publish.