171–180 of 313 posts
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We're taking about a trillion dollar company who can afford all of the talent and has very limited time pressure. I would prefer they do it correctly.
This misses the point. A trillion dollars goes a lot further when the software is cheaper.
> installed desktop web apps are really starting to look and feel like native apps I think we are having the opposite problem: native apps are really starting to look and feel like web apps, and in many cases, they are. The problem: the web has a terrible UI toolkit for desktop apps. It has clickable links and basic forms, that's all. It was made for documents, not apps. If you want better than that, you have to rewr…
I think you're not giving credit to the best part about the web: CSS.
I've been programming GUIs with Java AWT, Swing, and Qt for years. Nothing comes close to CSS when it comes to defining layouts.
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The Windows style for bars (both title and status) is way too large. Ditto for the task bar. It's no wonder people are tempted to not use status bars, and shove as much as possible at the title. If applications could exploit the task bar, they would too. (Anyway, you don't need an entire bar for system interaction. But applications aren't designed in a way that allows this.)
The older I get, the more I respect bigger user interface elements and text. It's not even failing eyesight either; I'm still in my mid 30s and have great eyesight and dexterity. I've come to respect bigger interface elements because they are quicker to work with. I don't have to peck for a title bar if it's there, big and empty in front of me. I don't have to hunt for a scroll bar that hides itself and reveals a 1px…
Unfortunately, the designers all seem to have 72" 8K professionally color-calibrated monitors and a $1000 mouse, and think if it works for them that's good enough.
I saw the start of this in the mid-2000s when the web trend was for grey-on-grey 8px fonts. I went to the designer and asked what the heck he was thinking and he showed me his screen; and yeah it was kinda legible there. Still bad design.
Nowadays the trends are flat UI where you don't even know what's clickable/actionable, hidden things that only appear when you mouseover them, and on touchscreens, secret functions that only trigger if you swipe in just the right way with just the right number of fingers in just the right pattern.
Design has just been getting progressively worse and worse ever since 2000/Windows XP.
I actually wish programs do not put content in the Title bar area. The title bar area is meant for users to move the Window around. Try opening Microsoft Word, make the window narrow and drag the window. You have to hunt for a small bit of empty space in the title bar or you have to understand you could drag on the Title text, Search box and the Sign in Username, but not the Auto Save text, Upcoming Features icon, or…
I much prefer what a lot of Linux desktop environments support, which is holding down alt and clicking anywhere on a window to move it. With that + a keyboard shortcut for closing a window you can get rid of title bars on apps entirely if you want. Sadly Windows doesn't support it natively, although there's another comment on this thread talking about ways to make it work.
> installed desktop web apps are really starting to look and feel like native apps I think we are having the opposite problem: native apps are really starting to look and feel like web apps, and in many cases, they are. The problem: the web has a terrible UI toolkit for desktop apps. It has clickable links and basic forms, that's all. It was made for documents, not apps. If you want better than that, you have to rewr…
> The problem: the web has a terrible UI toolkit for desktop apps. It has clickable links and basic forms, that's all I think you're not giving credit to the best part about the web: CSS. I've been programming GUIs with Java AWT, Swing, and Qt for years. Nothing comes close to CSS when it comes to defining layouts.
> installed desktop web apps are really starting to look and feel like native apps I think we are having the opposite problem: native apps are really starting to look and feel like web apps, and in many cases, they are. The problem: the web has a terrible UI toolkit for desktop apps. It has clickable links and basic forms, that's all. It was made for documents, not apps. If you want better than that, you have to rewr…
> Traditional Windows apps all use system provided common controls, because they are good, and therefore they have a consistent look and feel, even through OS updates. This hasn’t been consistent since at least Vista and the release of WPF, which does totally custom control rendering. Circa 2006. I think web is taking over on Windows because any of 10 or 15 different design systems can get you to a better app than th…
Any more details on what web technologies are being used in Visual Studio and what parts of the UI are done with web?
With all this Electron and PWA focused development a cannot shake a feeling that we add an extra layer of a "runtime" on top of an operating system, that could be avoided. An extra layer which occupies RAM space and processor time which feels unnecessary but it is where we are headed. I wonder if the reason is simple, that we (myself included) have not provided anything better or the reason is that big corporations w…
I'm gradually starting to see X11/Xlib as a solution for cross platform desktop apps. It is the native GUI API for most UNIX operating systems. Ports exist for Windows(win11) and Mac which makes X11 technically portable to them as well. Its not exactly an elegant solution I have to admit. But the licensing problems with QT make a lot of people nervous, GTK seems to be pretty polarizing, and for whatever reason WxWidg…
FLTK has never seen adoption even to the level of wxWidgets I think, but to be honest it is also quite simply hideous. I have not found a proper looking theme for it either, since I was mildly interested in using it to add a simple GUI to a Rust tool.
I want the opposite of a PWA. I want an app which can be compiled into Desktop/mobile builds and also interpreted in browsers. An alternate HTML/CSS/JS with no JavaScript.
So ... Flutter? https://flutter.dev/
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> For companies like Microsoft making something like Teams, I think it sucks. They have the resources to make native apps and when you have tens of millions of users, adding support for another platform would cost them pennies per user. Back when I worked at Microsoft, 2014 or so, we had serious problems finding Win32 developers. We essentially had to train people up. While I am sure the Windows org had lots of them,…
> Back when I worked at Microsoft, 2014 or so, we had serious problems finding Win32 developers. We essentially had to train people up. Microsoft only has itself to blame for this. They charge an arm and a leg for their dev environment setting it up is a pain no matter what, the stuff you get “free” when you pay for the dev environment is not nearly enough to create anything worthwhile. So why should any CS departmen…
What is it that we need 10 years experience in this week? Win32, OCX, DCOM, CORBA, OWL, ActiveX, WinForms, WPF, ASP, SliverLight, .Net, XNA (etc. etc.)?
Kind of amusing that so many people turned to web tech to escape that treadmill and then just totally recreated it in javascript.
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> I don’t think Windows is ever going to be left behind I do, but not for reasons most people think about. The Windows 11 UI/UX is trying to emulate MacOS. Clearly, Microsoft is giving the finger to people that use Windows because it's not MacOS. I can't wait for Windows 12 to happen and all the UX things I hate about MacOS get implemented in Windows. Might as well start training my muscle memory to hit the Windows k…
> so that when Microsoft decides that CTRL-X/C/V should be WIN-X/C/V, I'll be ready Already starting to go this route. While you can still ctrl-x/ctrl-v, most of their newer features implement the windows key, including win-v for paste using clipboard history. While printscreen works, you can use win-s to take a screenshot now too.