Please don't make an entire paragraph bold--it's like using all caps. You come across as shouting to make your point.
To address your broader point:
A good user experience is incredibly important, and I agree that the Mac platform is better than other platforms in this respect--it provides a more consistent, comfortable, and elegant user experience. However, a good user experience is completely orthagonal to the technology used to implement it. A good user experience is one that provides the user's required functionality in a comfortable, pleasant, discoverable environment, and which facilitates rather than hinders the user's work.
Cocoa has no inherent superiority over other frameworks in terms of delivering a good user experience. It all depends on the skill of the developer.
Here's a small list of non-Cocoa applications that provide as good, if not better, user experience as their Cocoa counterparts, in terms of their functionality and design. I first note the non-Cocoa application, and then its closest Cocoa equivalent in parentheses:
Librarian Pro (Delicious Library); Fetch (Transmit); Dreamweaver (Coda); Lightspeed (Checkout); Word 2008 (Pages); Acrobat Pro (Preview); Macintosh Explorer (Path Finder); File Buddy (X-Ray).
Take a look at a few of these apps. You may or may not agree, but my list above reflects my purchasing decision or, at a minimum, evaluation of a demo. In every case, I judged the non-Cocoa application to meet my needs better, or at least as well, as the Cocoa equivalent. This reflects the skill, effort, and attention to detail shown by the developer.
by Kevin Walzer — Jun 27
Please don't make an entire paragraph bold--it's like using all caps. You come across as shouting to make your point.
To address your broader point:
A good user experience is incredibly important, and I agree that the Mac platform is better than other platforms in this respect--it provides a more consistent, comfortable, and elegant user experience. However, a good user experience is completely orthagonal to the technology used to implement it. A good user experience is one that provides the user's required functionality in a comfortable, pleasant, discoverable environment, and which facilitates rather than hinders the user's work.
Cocoa has no inherent superiority over other frameworks in terms of delivering a good user experience. It all depends on the skill of the developer.
Here's a small list of non-Cocoa applications that provide as good, if not better, user experience as their Cocoa counterparts, in terms of their functionality and design. I first note the non-Cocoa application, and then its closest Cocoa equivalent in parentheses:
Librarian Pro (Delicious Library); Fetch (Transmit); Dreamweaver (Coda); Lightspeed (Checkout); Word 2008 (Pages); Acrobat Pro (Preview); Macintosh Explorer (Path Finder); File Buddy (X-Ray).
Take a look at a few of these apps. You may or may not agree, but my list above reflects my purchasing decision or, at a minimum, evaluation of a demo. In every case, I judged the non-Cocoa application to meet my needs better, or at least as well, as the Cocoa equivalent. This reflects the skill, effort, and attention to detail shown by the developer.