Brent Simmons on ‘Stock’ Mac UI

Brent Simmons: To recap: the reasons for using stock Mac UI are 1) user familiarity, which we’ve known for a while just isn’t a thing, and 2) hoping to be able to expend less developer effort, which we’ve seen can work against you. But there’s another reason: the stock Mac UI is designed by Apple, the best designers in the world, and do you really think you can do better? Really? The app world is full of people who think they’re better and they’re really, really, really not. Well, I still think Apple has the best collection of UI designers in the world, but, for whatever reasons, the guidance from above on how the Mac UI should look is missing the mark. I’m not blaming the people doing the work — they’re doing great work with the direction they’re given. So this — bad direction — is where the secret third reason falls down. And we’re left with no real reason to stick with stock Mac UI (except for wanting approval from longtime Mac people like me, and you really shouldn’t care about that at all). I was hesitant to quote anything from Simmons’s post, because you really ought to read the whole thing . (I’ve always loved the way Brent writes.) But I really like his emphasis throughout the piece on the term “stock Mac UI”. Debating the nuances of what it means for software to be “Mac-like” is one of the through lines of Daring Fireball since the very beginning. It doesn’t mean just one thing, and it doesn’t encompass just a few things. It’s a lot of things.

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