I have been using computers of various sorts for a long time, and one thing that has always been unique to the Mac is an enthusiasm for consistency. You rarely hear Windows users complain about programs not being “Windows-like”, and there isn’t really any fervent calls for “iOS-like” or “Android-like” apps either, but “Mac-like” (or Mac-assed, if you prefer) is something that exists. Mac users and developers see consistency as a mark of a quality app. It’s not just consistency within the app or even consistency with other apps, but consistency with the system. To them, the best Mac apps feel like they were cut from the same cloth as macOS itself.
This may seem unbelievable to someone who isn’t a Mac enthusiast, but just look at how Mac developers promote their software:
A Mac app through and through.
From its app icon and the way it looks and feels to the technologies it supports, Pixelmator Pro has been designed to be the ultimate Mac app.
If we’re being honest, Mac apps are a bit of a lost art. There are great reasons to make cross-platform apps — to start, they’re cross-platform — but it’s just not who we are. Founded as a Mac software company in 1997, our joy at Panic comes from building things that feel truly, well, Mac-like.
A few people have asked me, “What’s a Mac-assed Mac app?”
Answer: it’s a phrase I stole from my friend Collin Donnell to describe Mac apps that are unapologetically Mac apps. They’re platform-specific and they’re not trying to wow us with all their custom not-Mac-like UI (which often isn’t very accessible).
I always figured that at least part of this desire for Mac-like apps stemmed from the 90s, at least for older Mac users like myself. Whether they knew it or not, Windows users back then enjoyed a default status unimaginable by today’s standards. While Windows of the 90s wasn’t super consistent as a whole (it ran DOS programs for crying out loud), being the default meant that newly minted applications looked and behaved like Windows. For Mac users of the 90s, this meant having to deal with applications that were either half baked ports of their Windows counterparts or built using cross platform frameworks that were first and foremost trying to look like Windows.
While I still think this tortured past may have in the very least increased awareness of apps that aren’t Mac-like, I think there is another factor — surface area. I first used the term “surface area” when writing about catalyst apps in macOS. Here’s what I wrote back then:
By comparison, the bulk of iOS’s simplicity stems from a single app paradigm. Tap an icon on the home screen to enter an app that takes over the entire user experience until exited. Cohesion exists and is still important, but its surface area is much smaller because most iOS users only ever see and use a single app at a time. For better and worse, the single app paradigm allows for more diverse conventions within apps. Having different conventions for doing the same thing across multiple full screen apps is not an issue because users only have to ever deal with one of those conventions at a given time. That innocuous diversity becomes incongruous once those same apps have to live side-by-side.
The mental model I was thinking of, but didn’t put into writing at the time, was that windowed apps have a lot of surface area because they have a lot of visual contact with other apps. Not only does this matter when apps border and overlap with other apps, it also matters when multiple apps merely exist in the same visual space. By comparison, full screen apps have no surface area because they are visually exclusive. iOS and Android apps always run in full screen. iPadOS apps mostly run in full screen. Even many Windows apps typically run in full screen. Most Mac apps, on the other hand, are typically windowed and expected to share the desktop with other windowed apps.
This surface area deeply informs the role of an operating system. When apps only run in full screen and there is no surface area, the role of the operating system primarily revolves around navigation. The goal of iOS and Android is to quickly get you to the app you want. The user experience of those operating systems yields to whatever application is currently full-screened. When surface area is high, the role of the operating system shifts from navigating between apps to providing a cohesive user experience for all apps. It’s here where macOS shines, when work consists of going between multiple applications on the same desktop and that leverage the same user experience.
You may be thinking “isn’t it better for the operating system to just get out of the way?” That thinking only makes sense when the user experience of the operating system incongruously intrudes onto the user experience of the app. When the operating system and apps share the same user experience, there is nothing to “get out of the way.” In that scenario, the incongruous intruder is not the operating system, but inconsistency. Mac enthusiasts don’t want their operating system to get out of the way of their apps. Instead, they want their apps to get out of the way of the shared user experience of macOS.
In other words, they want their apps to be Mac-like.