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Comment by aroman | Hacker News Reader

Yes, absolutely we are doing different things. Examples include our launcher (from the top left hand corner), slingshot[1], our deprecation of the desktop as a place for folders, and our human interface guidelines. As another concrete example, we are very much trying to eliminate menu bars entirely. Instead, our apps use the "AppMenu"[2] -- a cog wheel that works similarly to Google Chrome.

[1] Here's a video I found of someone using a pre-release version of it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYwIQ9HcWZU

[2] (Note: images seem to be broken for the time being as a result of the website relaunch in tandem with Luna): http://elementaryos.org/docs/human-interface-guidelines/appm...

Full disclosure: I am an elementary developer and core team member.

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If I can make a suggestion, then, since I have your attention. The video on the page that the OP linked to basically shows a very OSX-like interface, especially by showing off the dock, a very (for the six seconds it's on-screen) iTunes-seeming music app, the expose-style window manager, and the multi-desktop. Maybe try highlighting some of these other concepts if possible in the video that most people who are coming to your site with no idea what makes elementary different are watching? Might help stem some of the "this is just Linux that looks like OSX" comments.

I appreciate the suggestion. We (as the elementary team) did not actually create the video -- rather, a (very talented) fan created it of his own accord and sent it to us.

I agree that we would be well served by highlighting the features of elementary OS which are visually dissimilar to OS X, but frankly, Apple doesn't own light color schemes and multi-desktops. The latter has been on Linux long before Apple implemented them in OS X with Leopard in ~2005. Furthermore the "dock" wasn't invented by Apple (RISC OS had it first, iirc).

I hope I'm not coming across as overly defensive. I definitely appreciate the comments and I understand that you are expressing your opinions about what you got out of the video. But, as I've said elsewhere in this thread, we're not embarrassed by our dock and multi-desktop implementation (which, by the way, actually works rather differently than any other implementation we know of, particularly with regard to dragging apps around). We're proud of them, and we want to show them off -- aesthetic parallels to OS X or not.

>We're proud of them, and we want to show them off -- aesthetic parallels to OS X or not.

This is completely understandable. I appreciate taking pride in your work,—we all do—but it's detrimental to adoption. You're sacrificing mindshare because of fondness for your work.

It boils down to a straightforward question: Are you more committed to creating a beautiful design (regardless of similarities to OS X) or are you more committed to bringing elementary to users?

If you're more dedicated to the former, I can respect that 100%, but it's important that this is the question you ask yourselves.

edit: clarity

I understand that you didn't do it with the _intent_ of copying MacOS, as such. However, to someone who has used MacOS, it's probably going to be perceived as a MacOS ripoff, and that tends to lead to negative responses; things which look almost but not entirely like other things really rub people up the wrong way, as we saw with the weird pseudo-native SWING themes and so on.

Slingshot looks pretty much like a non-fullscreen version of Launchpad[1].

[1]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3c/Lion_Launchpad...

I assume you were being sarcastic, but in case you weren't:

We don't have folders, you can't move the icons around, you can browse by category[0], and the layout (other than the fact that we have icons in a grid) is completely different.

Because we lay icons out in a grid, we're copying Apple? Come on.

[0] http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2011/258/8/d/slingshot_col...

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