Good UI means consistency. Make apps behave similarly, as much as possible. The actual ease of use, intuitiveness and learning curve depend on the complexity of the app. Something like Maya can never be as intuitive as a Twitter Client.
Apple is the king of good GUI. Hands down.
OSX was a bit fuzzy in the beginning, with the Pinstripe look and Aqua, later they introduced Brushed Metal which wasted a lot of space. But once they pushed for the current Unified GUI, they achieved something great. It's clean, minimalistic, efficient. And it's breeding a lot of wonderful 3rd party apps:
FantastiCal, Cobook, Scrivener, Coda, Transmit, Transmission, Twitter, Sparrow, Reeder, etc...
iOS is equally well done.
Apple also lays out guidelines, sometimes enforced guidelines, and the devs follow them well. That's where the consistency comes from and those 3rd party apps I listed above look & feel like Apple released them.
Windows 7 is not bad at all, but it is a whole lot less consistent. There is no uniform look to apps on that platform. And that is bad UI for me.
But Windows Phone 7.x is just horrible. Lots of wasted space. That is a no-go on a mobile device, but it's also extremely bad UI design on a 27" screen, as I've witnessed through the Windows 8 beta.
Android, while visually mostly starting out as an iOS clone, is not consistent. Every app, even those by Google, has a different look & feel.
The biggest bag of hurt from a GUI point of view is Linux. Any distro, really. No consistency at all.
Apple is the king of good GUI. Hands down.
OSX was a bit fuzzy in the beginning, with the Pinstripe look and Aqua, later they introduced Brushed Metal which wasted a lot of space. But once they pushed for the current Unified GUI, they achieved something great. It's clean, minimalistic, efficient. And it's breeding a lot of wonderful 3rd party apps:
FantastiCal, Cobook, Scrivener, Coda, Transmit, Transmission, Twitter, Sparrow, Reeder, etc...
iOS is equally well done.
Apple also lays out guidelines, sometimes enforced guidelines, and the devs follow them well. That's where the consistency comes from and those 3rd party apps I listed above look & feel like Apple released them.
Windows 7 is not bad at all, but it is a whole lot less consistent. There is no uniform look to apps on that platform. And that is bad UI for me.
But Windows Phone 7.x is just horrible. Lots of wasted space. That is a no-go on a mobile device, but it's also extremely bad UI design on a 27" screen, as I've witnessed through the Windows 8 beta.
Android, while visually mostly starting out as an iOS clone, is not consistent. Every app, even those by Google, has a different look & feel.
The biggest bag of hurt from a GUI point of view is Linux. Any distro, really. No consistency at all.