Be Native (at least, Look Alike)

Submitted by mk on 11 October, 2007 - 18:18

Fitting in to the visual appearance of the native operating system may seem like a reasonably obvious decision, but it certainly isn’t one that every cross-platform application or windowing toolkit makes.

For instance RealPlayer (image) uses a custom appearance across operating systems, as do applications built using Java’s Swing windowing toolkit (image). Personally I think a unified cross platform UI results in applications that at best feel foreign everywhere, and at worst don’t even feel like real applications.

From Alex Faaborg's Blog - The Firefox 3 Visual Refresh: System Integration

That's the reason why Swing sucks and Real became the second worst tech product in history.

P.S. a little bit more quote:

Mozilla’s user experience team literally wants to do a better job of visually integrating with Windows than IE, and a better job of visually integrating with OS X than Safari.

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Comments

bact'

12 October, 2007 - 19:50

partly agree, but Safari and iTunes for Windows do the same thing ni ? :P

mk

12 October, 2007 - 21:59

bact': So those are bad UI, I never use them.

n-blue

17 October, 2007 - 18:42

As far I have seen, iTune and Safari is far away in this concept. Likely to be stranger on XP or Vista. Bwt, take look at Office 2008 for Mac. It like like Apple's application rather than Microsoft's itself.

I think Apple have idea that thier interface is cool, so why they look just like gray object in other colors.

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