UI Design

Quicksilver

Quicksilver

Find a golden apple.
I'm looking into designing an application UI but I want it working on both mac os x and windows. In terms of UI design I like the look and feel of mac os x and see that the os x look can be made on windows too. a classic example is iTunes. It looks almost exactly the same on both platforms.

How do i do that? is there a special application i need? I only want to design the UI im not interested in coding at this point. Obviously i would use xCode for mac but what about windows? does anyone know how apple did that? I'm interested to learn more about this.


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I'm not sure how they did that. 99% chance they used all internally designed components. If you're wanting to design a cross platform interface, you need to find which GUI components exist on both platforms, and how each platform does what you want in its own standard way.

I can tell you now that if you're going to try to make a Windows application look like Mac OS X, it will be ugly, unless you have a team as talented as the iTunes team. Sorry, but it's the truth. If I were you, I'd let your Mac app look like a Mac app, and your Windows app look like a Windows app. :)
 
You could write the app in java.... The default UI in Mac OS X is Aqua and you can set it to a windows look alike on a windows box...
 
I think Apple just rolls their own interface in iTunes for Windows. AFAIK, there are no reusable libraries for recreating the OS X look on Windows. You'd need to simulate everything yourself (which might not be legal, since Apple must have copyrights on their UI bitmaps).
 
If you want to use Xcode and write native interfaces for your applications, have a look at the C++ development library called wxWidgets. It is perfect in terms of GUI fidelity, as it wraps around native components (unlike Qt or Java Swing). The only downside is the API looks like something that came out of the early 90's.
 
Ok i finally found out how to do it.

Mikuro, what do you mean Apple would have a copywrite on their UI bitmaps? who can i speak to to find out? and most of all why wouldn't they allow somone to create a osx looking app for windows too. wouldn't it help people to switch?


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Apple owns all its little shiny buttons and every other bitmap that encompasses the programs they design, just as they own the code underneath it and all the icons that adorn it.

They most definitely do NOT want just anyone to create an OS X looking app for Windows. Even iTunes uses the Windows minimise, maximise and exit widgets. They've got a brand image with iTunes and QuickTime that allows them to bring it over, however bringing an OS X interface to Windows users would not only be bad in that it could never be *quite* perfect, but it'd also be shocking because it would be hideously inconsistent with the rest of the user's UI. They'd rue the damn traffic lights and the scrollbar arrows both at one end, and therefore rue OS X by inference.

Good UI design conforms to the standards the OS itself strives for. So that means you're best to design a new interface for each platform (but with enough similarities in function that it is uncomplicated for cross-platform use).
 
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