For the past week or so, my brain has just not been cooperating with this blog. Giving myself permission to write about anything I want here was liberating, but even that freedom hasn’t been enough the past few days. I stare at the blinking cursor, and then I feel my mind drifting off, not to some great blog topic, but just weird little mundane things and thoughts. Nothing that I’d want to share in this space.
I do have a backup–a collection of blog ideas saved in Obsidian. But a lot of the topics I’ve jotted down no longer appeal. A lot of them are Apple kvetching, and I exceeded my quota on that at least 50 years ago.
So I end up doing these meta posts.
Oh, I just thought of a topic: Mastodon clients!
Mastodon is the only social media I use semi-regularly right now and I like it because:
- No ads
- No “reels” or other unavoidable short form videos
- No algorithm–I only see the people/orgs I choose to follow
- Not overwhelming. I like that I can easily keep up with what I’m following. It feels cozy and approachable.
I also don’t visit Mastodon on mobile. It’s strictly on my Mac or PC. On the Mac, I use the Mona app, which is a one-time purchase (hooray) and works well. On Windows, I use an alternate web version currently in alpha called Elk. It improves on the web interface and is pretty good, with only a few minor shortcomings. Still, I’d rather use a dedicated client, but all the Windows clients seem to have some flaw, the most common of which is they are ugly as butt. Windows apps don’t have to look ugly, but so many do. Every Mastodon client I’ve tried has been butt ugly. So I use Elk.
I don’t know why, exactly, the odds of a Mac app looking better than a Windows app is so high, but I suspect that it has something to do with the Mac GUI always being “good” and remaining fairly consistent over the years, with few dramatic changes. There’s a polished kind of consistency.
With Windows, well, just look at the GUI for different flavours:
- Windows 1.0. I mean, yikes. But it was also 1985.
- Windows 3.0. Pretty slick for the time, but crude by today’s standards.
- Windows 95. Pretty decent, really.
- Windows XP. Changed pretty much all UI elements in a way some liked, but others didn’t, feeling it was too “cartoony.”
- Vista. Ignoring the initial quality of the OS, it again completely revamped the look, giving everything a pseudo-3D effect and having a glossy, reflective sheen to it.
- Windows 8. Another complete change, flattening everything and subbing in garish colours and simplified icons.
- Windows 10. A hybrid of 7 and 8 that reverses some of 8’s design.
- Windows 11. A refinement of 10 that again changes the look of many elements, though perhaps not as dramatically as before.
Basically, if everyone followed the design language of Windows 11, apps would look pretty good. But a lot of apps seem to be weird hybrids of older versions of the OS and that’s when you get butts meeting the ugly.
Oh well. In the end, we’re seeing fewer native apps on both Windows and Mac as more devs use tools like Electron to make apps that look and feel the same (and don’t feel particularly native) on all platforms. I guess that’s the future.
