Yosmite GUI and your app

I am pretty busy ‘adapting’ my apps to Yosmite regarding GUI.

The major issue is when you adapt your icons and general graphics to 10.10 they will look funky on ‘older’ OS X versions.
BTW I’m not speaking of native controls because they will have the new look by default.

So I am planning to release separate versions for Yosmite and OSX10.9 and lower. Not the best solution though.

How do you guys are handling this?

Why not just check the system version and display the proper graphic?

[quote=124436:@Christoph De Vocht]I am pretty busy ‘adapting’ my apps to Yosmite regarding GUI.

The major issue is when you adapt your icons and general graphics to 10.10 they will look funky on ‘older’ OS X versions.
BTW I’m not speaking of native controls because they will have the new look by default.

So I am planning to release separate versions for Yosmite and OSX10.9 and lower. Not the best solution though.

How do you guys are handling this?[/quote]

In many ways, I feel 10.10 versus previous versions to be like the Mac OS X/Windows versions. Most of my apps coe in both platforms, which imply very obvious UI differences, and necessity to adapt.

I have tried both approaches : two different sources, and conditional execution inside one source. The latter is what I prefer, since maintenance is facilitated, otherwise I have to copy changes from one platform to the other and that’s tedious. Adding Yosemite does not seem out of reach.

My latest app has a flat icon, but it does not look too terribly out of place on the dock in 10.9.5. Incidentally, there are already flat icons for Photoshop and Skype.

Marketingwise, separate versions is probably the worst move. Especially in the Mac App Store, how are you going to market the non-Yosemite ? Destined to prior versions but if you upgrade the OS they will still work but not as cute ? If I were a customer, I would not like buying a software that is marked obsolete …

When I decided to improve the UI for my app, I soon realised that I needed to start from scratch again. So I had a look around and guessed that Yosemite would be flat, so I designed my app with a flat UI for all systems, but kept the toolbars (for main window and preferences) managed by Apple. So on Mountain Lion and Mavericks, the icons display their 3D look and they look flat on Yosemite.

I thought it would be hard to flatten my UI, but then it became very easy quickly. The best of it is that I struggled with my first UI son WIndows and Ubuntu. When I flattened my UI, it became very easy to implement it on Windows and Ubuntu.

I’ve tried to adopt as much of the OS graphics as possible, this way they look right on 10.9 and on 10.10. For icons that are not part of the system, I’ve created my own single color icons and set them as ‘Templates’ so that again the system will handle it for me.

Once Yosemite is released, I’ll do another xDev article detailing how I was able to do this and various other interface tricks that work for both 10.9 and 10.10.

If you haven’t already download Backup To Go and try it on both systems. There is a newer version “In Review” at the moment, which features several improvements.