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What's the best designed Mac app you know?

Swift apps, not Electron.


I really like the new NetNewsWire: ranchero.com/netnewswire/

For me that's a great example of what a Mac app should look and work like.

Marc — The UI looks like a classic mac app, do you have identified what really created this wellness effect while using it?

It looking like a classic Mac app is exactly what I want. That way it fees like a native part of the OS and I don't need to learn a new interface. I can rely on my experience of all other Mac apps. Keyboard shortcuts work as expected, window management does too, etc.

When developers get too creative with their interface it usually does more harm than good.

I think developers tend to design their app in isolation rather than considering it one of many moving parts of someone using their Mac.

Don’t you think it can limit the arrival of new UI paradigms? Notion or Superhuman are good examples of that, most people love Notion because of the feeling of freedom while using it + the neat interface — it would never have happened with a classic mac app.

Yeah that's a good point and I'm glad people experiment with different paradigms. Practically speaking though, I usually find the more traditional approach the most intuitive. That's probably partly because I'm used to it, but I believe it's also because it's a paradigm that has stood the test of time and been iterated on many many years.

Great point on the robustess of a paradigm 🔮

I really like Soulver (soulver.app/). Clean, fast, powerful, and very Mac-like.

Great! Just curious about Soulver, for what use case do you use it the most?

I have it open all days for small checks/calculations that I do while coding, currency conversions, computations like "2560 is to 1440 as 2000 is to what", etc. Of course I could use Excel, Google Sheets, or my phone's calculator but Soulver works faster for me.

I would say that Notion in general is a beautiful app: notion.so

Sure, but It's a wrapper in Electron :(