\n\nJust as having a well-chosen name helps you be more Mac-like in a peculiar but significant way, having the right icon is crucial. Here's a hint: a rectangle with some letters in it is not a great icon design. OK, Adobe has a buttload of apps to install on your hard disk, and coming up with a visual style that is consistent, attractive, and yet gives each app its own identity would be hard. But it's not impossible -- Apple has managed it with... basically all of its major apps. Personally, I think Adobe's best icon idea was Illustrator's Venus, subtly updated to show off Illustrator's increasing functionality over time (more in the splash screen than the icon itself). Adobe's real problem is that it has too many apps that are essentially the same thing folded differently -- what icon would you give Fireworks to say \"it's like 43% of Photoshop with some tacked-on Web-specific functionality, with an unreadable UI, randomly disorganized\"? Hmm... something colorful exploding is probably perfect!\n\nBut again, let's return to our original comparison. Acorn's icon is beautiful. (Acorn's icon is its best feature!) Photoshop has an icon that I'm willing to bet was designed by a committee. The best thing you can say about the CS4 icons is that well, they don't completely suck. At least you can recognize them and they're not horribly ugly. But Blender has a pretty nice icon, and Cheetah 3d's is, well, meh.\n
Conclusion
\nThis is not superficial stuff. To make a program that's \"ugly but good\" -- like Blender or Photoshop -- Mac-like involves eliminating (at best) or reducing the proliferation (at minimum) of floating windows and palettes (Blender's there, Photoshop is as far from this as it's possible to be); streamlining, simplifying, and organizing your user interface (Blender is in the process of doing this, Photoshop has been sitting on its ass here for nearly twenty years); making your user experience as lightweight and responsive as possible (Blender is fine here, Photoshop's torpid bloat seems to be a result of deep architectural problems -- its launch time is more comparable to an OS than an app), and having a great icon and a good name (Blender's name and icon are Just Fine. Obviously, it would be stupid to rename Photoshop when its name has become a verb in common use, but its icon could easily be fixed).\n\nBlender's not mac-like, but most of its worst issues are either intrinsic to being a full-featured 3d app, or in the process of being addressed, and it has no fundamental, unfixable problems. Photoshop is a horrible mess. Its functionality is indispensable, but unless, as Merlin Mann suggests, they simple start over from scratch, Photoshop isn't going to be fixed. The best we can hope for is some incremental UI improvements, adherence to platform standards unless there's a darn good reason (and Adobe has shown no sign of having any such darn good reasons), optimization, and a visit from the Icon Fairy.\n\nPerhaps the real takeaway point is that programs already considered \"Mac-like\" -- such as Cheetah 3d, Acorn, and Cornerstone, can always become more Mac-like. iTunes 9 is a pretty fine example.","$updatedAt":"2024-06-05T09:24:33.871+00:00",path:"how-to-be-mac-like",_created:"2024-07-09T20:32:05.874Z",id:"1660",_modified:"2024-07-09T20:32:05.874Z","$id":"1660",_path:"post/path=how-to-be-mac-like"},"page/path=blog":{path:"blog",css:"",imageUrl:"",prefetch:[{regexp:"^\\/(([\\w\\d]+\\/)*)([\\w-]+)\\/?$",path:"post/path=[3]"}],tags:["public"],source:"",title:"",description:"",_path:"page/path=blog"}}