Since over the years it has become increasingly clear that Apple’s developers cannot for the life of them write Windows applications with any sort of the attention to detail for which they are known, and since it is also an arduous task to educate those who have not personally experienced the cavalcade of mediocrity that is anything made by Apple with the extension .exe, I want to array out just how oddly inconsistent and sometimes frustrating these applications are. Rather than start right in with the evisceration, however, I want to go over the sole Apple application that actually took Being a Windows Application 1-2: Software Update, for some mysterious reason.

Apple Software Update

Ignoring the obvious aberration that under no circumstances should bug fixes necessitate a 75MB download, Software Update by and large is the best application of the four. It’s consistent with the visual theme of the system rather than foisting it’s own look upon everyone, it (mostly) uses Windows design conventions (except for one big one: Tools>Options is the preferred way, not Edit>Preferences. An entire menu in the menubar could have been eliminated by following this simple paradigm.)

Quicktime

I’ll start with the most mature application of the group, and by mature I mean senile. Remember when Apple thought so highly of encasing every product they made in brushed aluminum that they got half way through their software library before realizing robovomit isn’t attractive? Quicktime is a monument to that bygone age. It’s also a monument to the bygone age of Windows 98, because that’s what all the options dialogs look like.

iTunes

Next up is iTunes, and the best thing I can say about iTunes is that it shed its robovomit shell. The worst thing I can say about it is that it’s one of the worst applications I’ve used outside of malware because any decent feature it may have is buried under a thick layer of slow, but that’s besides the point. The point is that it forces a custom skin that in no way wants me to run out and switch to a Mac (although it does create the urge to do things involving blunt, rusty nails and cute innocent creatures, although I’ll probably be sent to jail.) The most puzzling issue is that unlike Quicktime, options dialogs no longer hearken back to Ye Olde Windows; they’re native no matter the theme applied.

But wait, it gets even more confusing!

Safari

This is by far the least conforming application of the group (that applies both to Windows in general and the applications in said group.) Not only does it go the distance and fully skin everything, it even has its own font rendering shared by nothing else. Unlike iTunes, Safari is not cripplingly slow, although it does throw just about every Windows interface convention out the window with not even a hint of hesitation.

Anybody have an answer for why this is? I’d love to know. My current theory involves Jobs as a being not of this dimension and the alignment of several crucial stars, but maybe there are others out there.