I can comfortably say that Cocoa is one of the best UI platforms there is, owing to its standardized, beautiful and intuitive interface. Most Mac apps are built using this framework which makes them consistent. A clean and simple looking menu bar, for example, throughout all software is an almost welcome offering. I guess Windows sort of got it right till 98, after which a series of mishaps and unaccounted justifications led them to a not-so-friendly place in the world of User Experience. I’ve been a fan of Windows for 8 years, and it took me less than a week with OS X to wipe the past out.
Just to get even on all my Windows bashing in the last two years, I actually thought over instances where some of my favorite Mac apps don’t fare too well. Here’s a list, and I sincerely hope all you guys at Apple, Google, Ate Bits, Mozilla… hear these out and do something about it. After all, there’s always room for improvement!
Tweetie:
Tweetie is such an awesome app for managing my Twitter account. It even supports multiple accounts, conversations, image posting, URL shortening… just so many important features in a beautiful and crisp UI. Although there’s a very important function missing – Delete tweet. I don’t think I need to state why it’s necessary! Hope Tweetie 2 brings out this feature, and possibly a lot more.
Firefox:
What a fantastic browser – easily the best of them all (I should tell you that Safari is my one and only “Tumbler”/Chevy V8 Rig).. but it takes up too much memory. It’s insane. Guys at Mozilla seriously need to sort this out. Google’s Chrome is super fast with their process driven tabs, what’s happening here? The experience of browsing the web is lost with such a memory hog. Most of my RAM is consumed by Firefox when I have more than 5 tabs open. That just sucks.
Google:
Where on earth is Google Talk for Mac? Any plans, ever?!
Mac Finder:
Why isn’t there an option where I can save the window size/position? I know there are third party apps available (such as Afloat), but these are basics that shouldn’t be overlooked. And of course, ‘forgiveness forever’ control? Undo accidental copy/move? Mapping this intuitively?
iPhoto and iTunes:
Some serious work on the storage databases may help. They just eat up disk space like crazy. How about learning a thing or two from Picasa? Tagging in iTunes? Tune detection (like Face detection)?
Transmission:
A neat little client for torrents, although the process of verifying and building files after/during a download sucks, and even fails sometimes. I’ve lost GB’s of data during this process. How about a ‘state’ saving feature? It will kick ass!
There are more, but I guess I can live with them. I’m sure many of you feel that an app can do better when you’re actually using it. I encourage you to contribute to this list! If you have any app suggestions, ping me and I’ll feature in it in the next version of this post.
