I'm not sure I agree with the Cocoa interface purity (or snobbery, depending on your point of view) that I'm seeing here. I spend all day using a wide mix of programs on my Mac, and while I prefer those that provide a better "Mac user experience," I'd say only a minority of the apps I use are Cocoa. Here are the apps that I spend the majority of my time in:
Seven Carbon apps, four Cocoa apps (only one of which is a third-party/non-Apple app), a Java/Aqua port of an X11 app, and two X11 apps deployed as standalone app bundles.
I'd say that the common denominator of all of these apps (even the X11 ones) is that they try to provide a good Mac user experience--and they succeed, in my opinion. NeoOffice is better than OpenOffice in this regard, for instance (though even OpenOffice is now deployed as a standalone app bundle with an AppleScript stub launcher). I simply don't think Cocoa is essential to providing a good user experience; understanding the HIG *is* essential. (I use a cross-platform toolkit--Tcl/Tk--to develop Mac-only applications, so I have some understanding of this issue.)
by Kevin Walzer — Mar 21
Office X
NeoOffice
Aquamacs
IDLE
Terminal
Dreamweaver
InDesign
Safari
Mail.app
Thunderbird
Firefox
Vienna
Gimp.app
Inkscape
Preview
Acrobat
Seven Carbon apps, four Cocoa apps (only one of which is a third-party/non-Apple app), a Java/Aqua port of an X11 app, and two X11 apps deployed as standalone app bundles.
I'd say that the common denominator of all of these apps (even the X11 ones) is that they try to provide a good Mac user experience--and they succeed, in my opinion. NeoOffice is better than OpenOffice in this regard, for instance (though even OpenOffice is now deployed as a standalone app bundle with an AppleScript stub launcher). I simply don't think Cocoa is essential to providing a good user experience; understanding the HIG *is* essential. (I use a cross-platform toolkit--Tcl/Tk--to develop Mac-only applications, so I have some understanding of this issue.)