Windows to OS X Part 2 – Sticker Shock

An unfortunate fit of parsimony, mercifully brief, resulted in the acquisition of an HP widescreen monitor, rather than the usual Apple kit.  It works well enough, although it lacks the tight integration with hardware you get with the name brand stuff.  Today it sits on the desktop without looking too much like it came from Battlestar Galactica, but the experience of unpacking it remains illuminating.

The experience of unpacking Apple gear is well-known to be awe-inspiring to people who like that sort of thing – but for most of us the simplicity is what appeals.  Unpacking the HP has left only a single significant memory:

Stickers!

It was covered with peel-off plastic stickers, hard and annoying, but not impossible to remove. It’s not hard to understand the reasoning behind the stickers, but to leave your customers with stickers! as a lasting first impression can’t be the desired result.

There’s a lesson here for application developers.  As with the hardware, the display of logos and branding information is done differently in the OS X and iPhone worlds. You spend a lot of design effort on your application icon, to get distinctive perspective and lighting that fits consistently with the other icons in the dock.  It does not look like your XP or Vista icon. You put the large version of your icon in the About MyApp window with some credits, perhaps to your developers and to other third parties whose frameworks and code you may have used. You add links to your website under the Help menu, along with video tutorials and other material that show your commitment to the Mac.

You do not ever, under any circumstances, waste main window space with a big, colorful and distracting icon, branding messages, or advertisement. Minimalism is a good thing on OS X. If you are very subtle, a subdued version of your icon, with little to no color, can appear transiently during longer operations or idle time, with an obvious way for the user to make it go away – like the gray Apple icon in the iTunes toolbar display.

On the iPhone you minimize by targeting your audience so specifically that your icon is everything you need – unless the user asks to see more, or you have a free app and are upselling to a paid app.

If you are designing a game – never mind.  Different set of rules, discussed on another day.

Windows to OS X Part 1 – There Is No Registry

When you port an application from Windows to OS X, you might ask yourself “How is OS X like Windows?” Put another way, you might ask “How will my knowledge of Windows help me program for OS X?”

The answers are “It’s not” and “It won’t.” You may not like the answer, but that’s how it is. There’s no disrespect meant to Windows coders – you could reverse the questions and you would still get the same answer – at least today.

There’s a natural human tendency to understand new things in terms of things we already understand. You can see this when you introduce widely experienced coders to  OS X; every time they see something that looks familiar, they’ll say “Ah, OS X works just like fill-in-the-blank.” That’s a trap that will mislead even the best: coding for OS X is not like anything you already know.  Well, unless maybe you were a NextStep or  SmallTalk coder, but even those only help in a general way.

Actual question from an actual Windows coder: “What’s the OS X equivalent of the Windows registry?”

Actual answer: “There is no registry.”

If you can get your head around that, you will start to learn, Neo…