Ask HN: Why do OSX applications look more polished than Windows/Linux?

Here are several reasons why they might look more polished:

1. Their font anti-aliasing algorithms are different.

2. Macs are less bumpy. Windows windows have draggable edges on all four sides. Windows toolbars were originally designed to be bumps. Now in Windows 7 the more polished looking toolbars look like a bunch of hills. Windows in Windows have their own menu bars, too. You can't just take an app designed to use draggable toolbars, remove the lines dividing toolbars, and have it work. So the APIs are different because of decisions made long ago.

3. Making an app pretty is more deeply ingrained into the development culture on the Mac side.

4. Windows applications just have more text, and fewer icons. There is always more text on the screen than a Mac would have. The desktop has the application name under each icon. They put shortcut arrows on icons.

5. Windows is skinnable.

6. Apple sacrifices utility in favor of being shiny.

The very short answer is the type of person drawn to open source projects. Apple (I imagine) spends a ridiculous amount of time on user interface, paying experts to go over their UI and making sure it sparkles. Whereas the programmers who donate their time to open source are a lot more involved in their projects, and don't spend as much time on the "useless" end sparkle.

To be fair, this is a very broad statement, and thanks to projects like Ubuntu focusing more on user interaction it's starting to make headway, but even just looking at what a mark of pride it is to be using something non-intuitively difficult (vim, emacs, cli interfaces, hand-rolling operating systems and packages...), the realm of UI design on open source projects is vastly underpopulated.

As to Windows, that's anyone's guess. It may be they're just relaxed enough in their market superiority that they don't feel the need to bring as many designers to the table. Or it may be the other way around: Apple knows that one of the only things that sets it apart from other companies (and Microsoft in particular) is snazzy design, and they've chosen that niche to run with as far as they can.

It's also the sum of details (wrt to the setting as a whole. Just to pick one):

The single menubar on top means also: You have infinite space on the top. If you scroll your mouse, because you want to click on a menu item, you can "virtually" scroll beyond the screen, yet still be on the menu bar. When I first read about this, and the reasoning, I found this quite surprising.