To be honest, I'd like to see the usability testing that 3rd party Mac developers do, because I'm fairly sure it is not that much! I'm a Mac user, and many applications 'look' nice, but don't necessarily behave nicely. Mac developers either design their own UIs (Which is the same as Windows' programmers designing UIs. Just owning a Mac doesn't automatically give us taste) or hire an 'Interface Designer' to do the work. However, on many well known Mac 'Interface Designer' websites, I never see any information concerning usability testing or interaction design, so it appears that they are merely designing the interface in Photoshop, making sure it just looks pretty!
That's a really good point. There are some Mac Apps that are 'pretty' but definitely need some UI work. Just because one is using Mac Widgets and Window styles doesn't make you a good UI designer. It would be interesting to see if the same app, with nearly identical widgets on either platform, would be easier to use on either. There are plenty of examples of these, and usually a 'port' of a UI from one to the other is a bit of a fish out of water (I'm thinking of that somewhat notorious version of Microsoft Word for the Mac that was more or less that). However, I can't remember a Windows user complaining of a Mac product that had been ported to Windows being 'too much like a Mac product'. I suppose that Safari is the closest thing I can come up with, since Apple even ported the non-standard font rendering, which some people don't like.
Also, a lot of the top iPhone applications have been developed and designed by Mac software houses, and they are some of the most appalling pieces of software ever. Heck, some can't even handle a phone call interruption?! It's a fricking phone, and software can't handle interruptions properly!
I know what you mean. Good UIs for iPhone apps (just like good desktop software apps) depend on developers having good examples. At last year's WWDC, Apple would let developers schedule a meeting with their iPhone UI group to critique their software (and I'll bet they are doing it this year, too). Some developers took advantage of it, but since there are so many apps these days, the vast majority of iPhone developers (regardless of their desktop orientation) didn't have that chance. Apple has posted a Human Interface Guidelines (http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/index.html ) but it can't cover all of the issues that game brings up, at least specifically (and there are a lot of games out there) ________________________________________________________________
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