Roots

There are a myriad of reasons people customize their interfaces: dissatisfaction with Apple’s own designs, in the mood for a certain color or style- maybe to satisfy a Futurama UI fetish- but the logic behind it doesn’t really matter. What makes CandyBar so successful because it is one app that all of these users can enjoy; an Aqua lover could use Maji and a more experimental soul can peruse the Iconfactory archives, and everyone is satisfied thanks to one product.

In fact, CandyBar’s model is so successful it hasn’t changed in years (and that’s a good thing). Here’s the first version of CandyBar, released in 2002:

Click any image for full-size.

Right from the start, Steven Frank and the Panic team already had the fundamentals of the app down, including the basic organization we see today. While lacking some of the features we take for granted, such as application icon changing, tricking out your system icons suddenly got simple. That laid down the groundwork for version 2.0, which let the company focus more on features, and less on improving usability:

Eventually all applications become dated, and though the CandyBar interface was fast and easy-to-use, anyone who owned Pixadex would tell you that it could use a push in the features department. The end result? Something beautiful, no less from two world-class software developers:

I think it goes without saying, but I will anyway: leave it to Panic to take a great idea and expand on it in a way that leaves the user no less than thrilled.

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MacThemes: What were some of your goals with CandyBar 3?

Ged: One of the biggest goals obviously was to support the new, 512×512 icon sizes. We knew they were coming for a long time and we knew people would want to be able to use them in Pixadex/CandyBar. It was important to get this feature into the app from day one. We also wanted to make it even easier for people to understand how to use the application, and how to take advantage of the Pixadex portions of the software. I think Panic did a great job of this in the end. I’m very pleased with just how clear, fun and easy to use CandyBar 3 turned out.

Cabel: We knew that we had to make a more significant product. We learned the hard way that the idea of “Little Apps”, which were to be super cheap and theoretically super easy to make, is not a great idea — a little app tends to generate as much work (and, more importantly, as much technical support) as a full app. So we didn’t want to do another CandyBar (or another Pixadex) unless we could do something spectacularly different and offering tremendous value by making a “real” product out of it. To be honest, there wasn’t much further we could take the two applications on their own — their product-life future was looking a little bleak — until we thought about combining them into one product!

There was some concern that CandyBar users wouldn’t want Pixadex in their proverbial peanut butter — but, with a few exceptions, the overwhelming trend in support e-mails is one of “I can’t believe how useful these two programs are together!”. That’s exactly what we were hoping for — we didn’t want to do it if it wasn’t for a good reason and really giving value to the user.

MacThemes: Were there any qualms about making CandyBar 3 Leopard only?

Ged: I personally had none myself. Panther and Tiger users have been using CandyBar and Pixadex for years and the potential to include Core Animation and some of other exciting feature of Leopard made the decision quite easy. Tiger users can’t take full advantage of 512×512 icons anyway, so the move to Leopard only was reasonable.

MacThemes: A lot of CandyBar 3’s new features seem to be about an evolution towards effortless icon management. So what’s one new feature that you’re personally excited about?

Ged: The biggest thing for me is that I no longer have to have two applications running when I want to customize/organize my icons. The whole “Send to CandyBar” feature in Pixadex worked okay, but the two apps really needed to be merged together. I’ve heard CandyBar users say they’ve never used Pixadex and vice versa from Pixadex users. Personally, I can’t imagine using one without the other, so hopefully by combining them, we can help illustrate what the other half has been missing.

Oh yeah, and switching Dock styles in a couple clicks is pretty darned cool too.

MacThemes: Additionally, what’s your favorite new bit of “eye candy” ?

Ged: Simply switching from one collection to another. The Core Animation cross-fade never gets old. I find myself just mousing around inside the program to see one icon fade into the other. It’s like watching a cheap version of those CGI “morphs”. Doing an “Arrange by…” and watching how the collection animates is neat too. For something fun, try arranging your entire icon library in different ways and sit back and watch the show.

MacThemes: Between icons and dock mods, CandyBar is shaping up more and more as a customizer’s best friend. Cabel, what have you thought about in terms of theming?

Cabel: We get a lot of interesting requests to expand CandyBar’s scope — toning down the menu bar is obviously a huge one, customizing stacks is an infinite one, and one guy really wanted to be able to replace the “Apple” icon in the menu bar — but shockingly not too many theme requests. I would be personally curious how large the market is for Mac users who want to totally skin the OS — is it just a handful of cool people, most of which are reading this right now, or is there a huge group of people who’d want it but not know they’d want it? It would be interesting to do some research on. To be honest, I don’t see CandyBar going too far in this direction anytime soon, but I never say never.

MacThemes: Pixadex is now integrated with CandyBar, and though it’s better to classify the app as a CandyBar-Pixadex hybrid, it is simply called CandyBar. I find this particularly interesting; was there ever a debate to market it the other way (”Pixadex now has CandyBar built right in!”), or was it simply established early on to stick with the CandyBar moniker?

Cabel: CandyBar had a much greater, much wider audience that Pixadex, for a variety of reasons, so it was always pretty much assumed that the CandyBar “brand” was stronger — there was surprisingly little debate on this point. (I really do love the name “Pixadex”, though.)

MacThemes: In an OS not inviting to customization, it must be difficult to develop software to customize anything in the system. Where do you see icons, themes, and overall GUI creativity going for the Mac? Did Leopard make anything harder for you from an engineering standpoint?

Cabel: So far, Leopard hasn’t really made things much harder for us — which has been great. But it could be a very different story if Apple decides to fully fire up “code signing” in a future release. If an application won’t launch if something is modified within it, that’ll make it pretty hard to modify something within it. I’m honestly not too sure what we’ll do at this point — increased security versus lack of customization is a rough debate to take part in. I’m pretty sure security would win. When the time comes we’ll deal with it, but until then, enjoy the ride.

MacThemes: I’ve long believed Panic applications prove the theory that Mac applications are better-designed (from a UI perspective) than Windows apps; what drives you to develop for the Mac only?

Cabel: It’s not even something we question or think about — it was just a no brainer. The innovation, the elegance, the lack of focus testing, the general feeling that people care about the end product, it makes us want to keep doing what we do. It’s a feedback loop of inspiration.

It’s almost impossible to feel passion about Windows as a platform. Probably like many of your readers, when I use software or applications, my brain can’t help but subconsciously notice an infinite stream of little things that are weird or out of place or questionably designed that I want to fix. When I try to use Windows, this internal alarm is literally constantly firing. Every window, every dialog, every workflow, my brain trips up on 1 or 5 or 15 things that are hard to comprehend. I can barely even use Vista without wanting to wrap it up, glaze it with a delicious marinade, cook it in an oven, garnish it with a sprig of mint, and toss it out the god-forsaken window.

(And as a general warning, once you tune your brain to the UI channel, you become hopeless. I had to stop the clerk at Border’s the other day to let me take a closer look at their internal book lookup application — it had some of the best/worst icons I’ve ever seen, like an “Add New” button that was a small crane lifting a shipping container and an even-worse rendition of the always-terrible “Filter” icon that involved a tiny coffee maker.)

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