Finding inspiration in new (and old) places. pt 1.

Oklasoft
Oklasoft
Jul 30, 2017 · 4 min read

If you ask most developers in our circles who their influences are they will be quick to come up with a laundry list of highly respected dev shops like BlackPixel, Panic, Omni Group, Bare Bones and countless others. These are all great shops and they deserve the highest respect, but these also obvious. The problem with listing these shops is at this point it is almost expected that they’re on the your list. While the tight knit Apple developer community is one of the best aspects of working on the Mac and iOS, when it becomes too insulated the opportunity for real innovation and risk taking is limited to the same select subset developers.

This article is not to draw criticism to these devs, but to say in a lot of ways more of us can be more like them by focusing less on what they’re doing specifically and start drawing insperation from places no one else is. All of the above shops could be a masters corse on how to build great software for the Apple ecosystem, but when everyone is focusing on just a handful of examples of how to do something well we end up with a limited number of variations on the same concepts over and over. This is something that I think is seen more on the Mac than iOS, but the same ideas can be applied to just about anything.

On the Mac the rule of thumb for building an app has always been make it feel like it’s something that would have shipped with the system, and then pack it with features and functionality that an app bundled with macOS wouldn’t. On iOS this idea is a little more complex with exactly where experimentation is expected and where sticking to the defaults is best practice being less clear, partially because it is a bigger market. While going the full electron rout of customizing everything and just wrapping a web app in a mac binary that just runs chrome is as far from what I think we should be aiming for🤢, it does to some extent provide some variety on the desktop and new ideas to think about in the rare cases it’s done well.

Just as a side not while there are valid reasons to use electron, it really should never be used only because you can make pretty things easier.

So where should we draw our ideas from? Remember when I said not to focus on Panic, Omni, BB et al? Well I was fibbing a little. A couple weeks ago Panic released the long awaited Transmit 5.

Along with all of it’s new features Panic did once again something they do better than anyone and take the basic Mac app concept and completely reconstruct it. Transmit has UI touches I havn’t seen in other app and that clearly where not quick or easy to implement. The lesson here being not to just take what they did and copy it, but think about how they find where they can make tweaks, changes and where appropriate barrow new UX elements from iOS and other platforms to create an app that is absolutely stunning while still undoubtedly being a Mac app.

Transmit is an example of a unique product that is overflowing with personality, it also was 7 years in the making. While the results of such attention to detail shows the time and skill to pull off the full Panic are often luxuries many of us don’t have. Luckily Personality can find its way into apps in other forms. Enter Visual Hub.

Visual Hub was a video transcoding app from the Tiger to Lion era made by @TylerLoch. While I could explain what exactly VHub did to have so much personality it would be easier to show.

These two approaches make users grow an attachment to your product. Still the most unique ideas come from places where their use may not immediately be obvious. In part 2 I’ll dive deeper into a few examples of things that aren’t Mac or iOS apps and how they’ve influenced my work. The value of some of these might not immediately be obvious, but if their impact is substantial enough to sit dormant for years waiting for the right moment to be let out the work they can inspire can be truly awe-inspiring.

Oklasoft

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Oklasoft

Small obscure Apple software company based on bad Simpsons reference working to be a less small less obscure software company based on a bad Simpsons reference

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