jL's dashboard

disclaimer: this part is a bit editorial and structured more as advice, so i broke it out from my last comment.

take it for what it's worth :-)

the only "living" themeable apps left lingering on the mac at this point are from mozilla (omitting quicksilver's with its alternative UIs, coz it's no longer under active development). and the most common themes amongst mac users for firefox in the last several years have been those that make it look even more "mac-like."

frankly -- and in my opinion as someone that works as a product manager at a large media company -- the QA issues incurred w/r/t testing themes during each release cycle alone are worth putting that idea to rest.

i humbly suggest that pandering to each customer's individual tastes is not a boat you want to board, as a developer. please understand i'm NOT belittling the value of listening to your customers. rather, it's important to understand that listening to all of them is the fastest route to disaster for your product. consider that the kids that are quite so into themeing are very fringe (which is just fine, mind you), and their tastes are all over the board.

the best thing, i find, you can do as a product manager is to assume the role of "curator," as Jason Fried describes here:

http://www.krisjordan.com/2008/09/17/...

apple certainly isn't on that boat. ever. and everyone using this app has already bought into that concept.

as most of the commenters have been suggestions: the primary aim behind using a HUD is consistency.

i would also like to give a clear nod to bill's point yestarday regarding usability issues for the color blind as being another key concern.

the achievement of UI consistency had been a long, hard road on the release history of OS X -- seven years in the making. pinstripes, no pin stripes, brushed metal, unity... Leopard finally put the nails into its silly coffin, and provided a fantastic suite of UI elements developers can consistently deploy across their apps to maximize this consistency.

the more developers capitalize on this, the better end-users are likely to be served by a consistent and reliable UX.

Just wanted to add that it'd be quite nice for Clippings to honor indentation levels, as well.

Was thinking that perhaps Growl is a bit better-suited for this notification use-case.

TextMate has the snippets thing *down*. These make a huge difference in development time when using something like Symfony.

I just bought Coda an hour ago because they're actually releasing, though (sorry, Allan, I get the "it's ready when it's ready" thing, but actually shipping something really gives customers a sense of life and progress).