Though I wonder if the use of Objective-C, and lack of any safety scissors-esque programming environments like Visual Basic, is helping keep out cruft like Bulk Rename Utility (http://bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Screenshots.php).
http://www.militaryfactory.com/cockpits/imgs/f16.jpg
Interfaces designed for experts tend not to hide important information and high performance features.
This Mac based product (http://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderRename/) apparently doesn't allow search and replace operations at the same time as sequential numbering even though it almost certainly allows both.
That you want "not to hide important information and high performance features" does not imply the interface has to be poorly designed. A well designed interface can accomplish both.
Most interfaces "designed for experts" are poorly designed crap --and make the work of the "experts" needlessly hard. That some swear by them is mostly "Stockholm Syndrome" (or it gives them a false sense of accomplishment to use something so badly designed, er, I mean "designed for experts".
I just downloaded the command line and GUI version. Thanks! :-)
Well, a typical Mac developer wouldn't touch that with a 100-mile pole...
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.
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.
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserEx...
b) Really? You have never heard of a programming culture, and how that could differ in Mac vs Windows vs UNIX programmers?
But also, it's a matter of copying what you see. When learning to program for the first time, a developer seems to do most of his or her learning on one platform, and copy that style for the most part (both the good and the bad, in everything from the design of GUIs to programming APIs). Regardless of what you think of either company, is there any doubt that Apple is better at coming up with good examples of design, than Microsoft? I consider Windows to be mediocrity breeding mediocrity; while this isn't 100% true, it's true enough for me to hate using the average PC.
Diversity is also a good indicator of quality; the more methods a programmer is familiar with, the more likely a program is to be well-designed. As a single platform, Mac OS X is pretty diverse; it comes with lots of tools, and is influenced by many different roots (Unix philosophy; NeXT/IBM with Objective-C/Smalltalk; classic Mac OS GUI elements; etc.).
My immediate perception was how important design was in Mac software. It's common to see the beauty and simplicity of a UI being used as a major selling point, which is not the case on Windows.
Though both Windows and OSX have HIG guidelines, they are routinely ignored by their creators _and_ 3rd party developers. I think the fact that Apple/Microsoft ignore them gives a license for 3rd party developers too also. It was quite a shock to me when the first time I updated my Mac, the close/minimize buttons in iTunes rotated by 90 degrees!
I believe part of the reason that people like to have beautiful apps on OSX is that if you are a Mac user, you probably _chose_ to be; whereas Windows is almost the default due to its ubiquity.
I agree completely with evanmoran; the developers are the same, but what sells on each platform differs.
There's a quite lengthy study of this subculture called 'Indie Fever' (http://www.madebysofa.com/indiefever/), which is worth reading, although I'd argue the gold rush environment created by iOS and App Store has weakened this community quite a bit.
Unless you go to conferences, you now can most easily see the 'indie Mac developer' aesthetic reflected in snark, like Read The Fucking HIG (http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/).
