Possibly the UI of iCal and Address Book might have the inconsistant UI, but they still have the exact same UX as every other OS X app, thanks to all (with the exception of iTunes?) being built in Cocoa so they all use the same text controls and menu items etc.

You can create a Cocoa app in XCode and just add a text field, and you will automatically get spell check, dictionary look-up and font controls. All your shortcuts will work exactly how you would expect them to (ctrl+a, I'm looking at you). You get a help menu with built in search of the menu bar (http://cl.ly/8yKI). All with no effort from the dev at all.

The only exception to this would be Adobe apps, but at least they have their own UI/UX that they seems to follow most of the time (but they actually hate Apple/OS X, so they probably just do it out of spite)

That's true about iCal and Address Book. I don't use either of those, so I'd forgotten what they'd done to them.

I'm not an "old-timey" Mac user by any stretch of the imagination, but I can't help wondering when Macs were "full of matte gray". Are you referring to pre-OSX days, because it seems that OSX is more gray now than ever before?

I am in fact. If I remember correctly (I may very well not!) Mac OS 8 or so (maybe 8.5) was the height of the let's-never-ever-deviate-from-the-HIG days.

This also included a glorious commitment to the desktop metaphor, when that phrase meant anything: you really could map your mental representation of virtual objects onto their real-life analogs and expect things to work remarkably like you expected.

Now, I don't know that a desktop metaphor is the right way to interact with a computer (I certainly avoid it like the plague), but it seems preferable, in my experience, to the hodge-podge of mixed metaphors that the modern desktop UI has become, in both Mac and Windows.

I'm reminded of the scene in The Big Lebowski when the protagonists encounter a group of nihilists: say what you will about the desktop metaphor, but at least it's an ethos.

You remember correctly; in the 8/8.5 days, Apple's HIG was considered a must-read for any application programmer, and deviating from it was guaranteed to get you lots of criticism. IIRC, about the only 'non-standard' common widget in applications was the floating windoid, which started out as a hackish WDEF.

As an (at the time) longtime Mac programmer and enthusiast, my disappointment in the OS X UI was one of the reasons that I walked away from Mac programming and never went back. In fact, OS X drove me to more seriously try out Linux and learn to appreciate Windows. Now, I tolerate OS X, but still find myself pining for good ol' 8.5.

iCal and Address Book are perfectly consistent. They use standard control which are clearly identifiable as such.

I think they are ugly but they are certainly not inconsistent.