The thing with having a Mac, at least to me, is the feeling it gives me. The genuinely well-thought out order of things. Everything just feels right. That’s why it bugs me when applications are for example ported and have an altered GUI (that is inferior to the Mac OS’s own). There are both good and bad examples of this. Mostly bad, though. Take, for instance, Mozilla Firefox. It looks alright by most standards, but there’s something there. There’s something that is off. Something that makes Safari feel like more of a Mac browser than Firefox. Let’s not even get into Opera. Mozilla Thunderbird is another example of a good idea, but with bad execution.
A good example would be Panic’s Coda application. It’s got a very good-looking, “Mac OS X”-feeling to it, even if it has been designed in a way that is not specific to Apple’s operating system. What it seems to boil down to, at least for me, is that it doesn’t matter that much if the user interface is different, as long as it’s good different, meaning the interface has been designed in an attractive and well-thought manner.
Therefore, it’s nice to see that something will happen to an app like Opera.
