The Ten Most Beautiful OS X Apps

Phillip Ryu writes "As someone in the Macintosh shareware business, as part of my job, I make the daily crawl through MacUpdate to look for the latest and greatest in Mac software. One thing I've been noticing recently is a renaissance of extremely polished and beautiful Mac apps, so I thought I'd share some of these finds with you guys. Without further ado, presenting the top ten most beautiful OS X apps. Hopefully you'll find some new gems in there, even I found a few surprises while compiling this list. Enjoy!"

Acquisition Cabos

[LanMan04]

I find Cabos to work a lot better than Acquisition, at least the Acquisition that existed 2 years ago (last time I tried it).

Re:LaunchBar should have made the list.

[revscat]

QuickSilver [blacktree.com]. LaunchBar is for has-beens. :)

Seriously though, after using LaunchBar for many moons I switched to QuickSilver after giving it a whirl. It's much more elegant, and on a personal level it fits my workflow habits better. Your mileage may vary, of course, but if you haven't tried it, do. Very tasty.

Beauty...

[Zx-man]

...should be in how the application interacts with you, not how it looks.
Most of Apple's own programs seem to have exactly this type of beauty.

Handsome is as handsome does . . .

[beadfulthings]

There are probably a million reasons why I'll get clobbered for this, but I'm going to throw caution to the winds and post it anyway:

Using the idea that utility is at least as important as beauty, I'm going to nominate my brand-new copy of NeoOffice. Why? As a single user and owner of a small business, it lets me compose, proofread, and print out a document--and then print out an envelope to mail it in. It allows me to email that same document in Word doc format to my brethren and sisteren who don't use Macs and don't have a clue as to file formats. It does all of this consistently and without any errors that I can discern. It does it without firing up a UNIX terminal emulator. It does it without my having to make my ponderous way through installing a cheap non-Postscript printer under UNIX. And it does it all for the price of the monetary donation I was delighted to contribute. It doesn't look too bad, but I wouldn't care if it was as ugly as sin.

So I say, Beautiful. Just absolutely beautiful.

Re:X11 Apps under MacOSX

[HuguesT]

The thing is I've never seen an X11 app behave sensibly under OS/X with the rest of the applications. Printing is special, services don't work, menus are not where they need to be. Drag-and-drop ? Did you manage all that ? Just about the only thing that works by default are the 3 buttons on the window's frame.

  If so this is a major undertaking, and If you really pulled all of that off in under a month, my hat's off to you, and I'd like a screenshot !

Please consider giving the OO.org people a tip or two.

I've personnally written a largish application that sort-of-works OK under OS/X, but with all the above caveats. I'm seriously thinking about rewriting the lot with a more sensible toolkit, in this case QT. It doesn't take as long the second time, apparently.

Re:X11 Apps under MacOSX

[SirPavlova]

Dude, I love you! Nobody ever writes et cetera using the & ligature... I avoid it myself just because not many seem to know what it means. Anyway, nice to see it being used.

Ahem... errr... okay, now I feel kinda awkward...

Bye bye... *runs away*