Artisteer for Mac Beta
Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.
I've been playing with the Artisteer for Macintosh beta and thought I'd write up my thoughts. If you're curious about my thoughts about the windows version please look here. To be fair as with any piece of software that is in beta, anything I discuss may change wildly before the final release.
Since the Windows version was written in something .NET based the folks over at Artisteer decided to use mono to port the package over to mac. One of the side effects of this is that it retains the Windows look and feel, as you can see in the image below. To a Macintosh purist having a ribbon interface would probably feel uncomfortable and overwelming. At the very least it feels out of place. They say they are looking into giving the program a more windows look and feel. View Image Details - Download Original]">
I suspect that the folks at artisteer are really programmers, because when they say beta, they don't mean "hey we're google, let's call it beta so we don't have the change the graphic" they mean "this may crash, totally mess up your computer, your roof may fall in, your girlfriend may leave you for a more attractive, richer man and we are not responsible". Probably because of the debug code, the software is actually slower then running the windows version in a VM. The application crashes like a 16 year old in a red sports car. Suffice it to say, I wouldn't categorize this as "production ready", but I didn't expect that it's beta.
All that said, I feel this is a first good step. As the windows version is solid, I'm sure the bug will get resolved (I filed a few bug reports myself). I do hope they do pay attention to the interface and generate something that has a Macintosh-like look and feel. I look forward to seeing what they come up with in the future.