Re:Show HN: Desktop Fruit – A Curated Blog of Mac App Design
by golergka on Friday January 29, 2016 @10:07PM
(#11000304)
Most of these concepts irritate me to no end by such enormous amount of wasted whitespace. May be it's an irrational thing (after all, personally I usually work with a pair of 1680x and 4k monitors and have no shortage of pixels), but I just don't get it: why use all these gigantic margins and spaces when instead UX designer could've just made the window smaller?
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Re:Show HN: Desktop Fruit – A Curated Blog of Mac App Design
by CharlesW on Friday January 29, 2016 @10:36PM
(#11000371)
The thoughtful use of white space (a.k.a. negative space) can improve readability/scannability, and to guide users by helping to create a visual relationship between various UI elements.
Cosmetically, generous negative space can help create a feeling of sophistication and elegance. I suspect that this kind of use is more offensive to practical people who have little use for how something "feels".
And of course sometimes it's overdone by designers, especially in cases of concepts serving as shiny, happy portfolio fodder instead of serving real users and business goals.
Re:Show HN: Desktop Fruit – A Curated Blog of Mac App Design
by seandougall on Saturday January 30, 2016 @01:42AM
(#11000838)
Whitespace can improve readability, but only up to a point. The Slack concept currently at the top of the list would fit less than a minute's worth of conversation in a moderately busy Slack channel, so the increased readability of individual messages comes at the cost of dramatically decreased readability of the conversation as a whole.
Re:Show HN: Desktop Fruit – A Curated Blog of Mac App Design
by kitsunesoba on Friday January 29, 2016 @10:30PM
(#11000357)
I agree with this. In addition, these designs all center themselves around app-specific themes, which is unfortunate because (at least IMO) one of the biggest benefits of a native desktop app is that it conforms to the system's look and feel by using standard widgets. Throwing that out the window in favor of style seems wasteful.
The desktop apps that impress me most are those with designs that create beauty through the stock system look and feel.
Re:Show HN: Desktop Fruit – A Curated Blog of Mac App Design
by HappyTypist on Saturday January 30, 2016 @12:32AM
(#11000681)
The best design is something that combines the native look and feel with a dash of style. You don't have to be 100% native UI elements, just very close to it.