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Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

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Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#241

Post by bayindirh »

t-sauer wrote: post #236
Iulioh wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about going "back" INSIDE an application? Think for example reddit, you open a thread, how do you go back? You open the "reply window, now ho you ho back? Maybe close it directly? I Android this is all handled by the same function and is often ranked as the most frustrating design choice in IOS

There is a common way to go back (swipe from the left edge of the screen). Some apps just don't integrate well and ignore the platform patterns.

I believe swiping from left to right is common for both Android and iOS.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#242

Post by cloud-oak »

Iulioh wrote: post #199
pjmlp wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a 70's child, in computing since the mid 80s you made me almost spill my Monday coffee. What a laugh, do you want the examples on Apple's side?

The evergreen question of "how do you go back and/or close an app on IOS?"

This one caught me completely off guard when opening YouTube the first time on an iPad: Accidentally clicked on a wrong button and got stuck in a "please subscribe to premium" modal. No amount of swiping or tapping outside the popup would help, only thing left was killing the entire app.

This experience put a major dent in my perception of the "Apple has the most intuitive UI" narrative.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#243

Post by pjmlp »

steve1977 wrote: post #211
pjmlp wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a 70's child, in computing since the mid 80s you made me almost spill my Monday coffee. What a laugh, do you want the examples on Apple's side?

I mean Cocoa and SwiftUI are more consistent in the sense that a lot of stuff automatically adapts when Apple changes styling. And they certainly have less churn and more focus compared to Microsoft. Basically it's been Objective-C and Cocoa since around 2000, later on Swift and then also SwiftUI. That's not too bad for 25 years. And in contrast to MS, you didn't get abandoned when you were sticking to the official f…

Sure, if we ignore the stuff and bugs they still have, the missing features in SwiftUI and performance regressions, or the iPhonisms brought to macOS with Catalyst.

The reboot of frameworks based in OpenGL with the Metal rewrite.

And many other things I am not bothering with since all those OS System N releases, A/UX UI framework, Teligent based documents,....

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#244

Post by Iulioh »

teekert wrote: post #238
Iulioh wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evergreen question of "how do you go back and/or close an app on IOS?"

I feel that some people are just too old to get used to the swipe based ui. I mean friends of mine who just keep buying the only phones with (screen based) back and home buttons.

I'm in that group.

It's not "getting used to", I feel like that gesture is less practical. It involves or using the "circle" to assist on how to use the gesture (creating a black void on the screen that you need to plan your use of the phone around) or having the swipe that 1) is not as reliable in my opinion and 2) can be triggered accidentally

For me is like claiming that touch screens on cars are the future and people are too old to get used to it.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#245

Post by bob1029 »

Winforms is still compelling to me. Now that we have WebView2, building complex hybrid apps is trivial. I know I could easily go pure web, but something about having proper native chrome feels better as a user. All of my clients/users are on windows so I stopped fighting this battle years ago. I've recently been using .NET10 + Winforms + WebView2 to build custom ai assistants for others. I cannot imagine how much it would suck to iterate the presentation of a conversation history in pure win forms. The hybrid stuff is crazy productive.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#246

Post by n8cpdx »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #177
n8cpdx wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes back pretty far. Nowadays the controversy is electron vs native (where most windows devs would consider WPF/.NET a native option). But if you read books from the 2000s, there was much discussion about the performance overhead of a VM and garbage collected language; something like WinForms was considered the bloated lazy option. I’m sure in a few years computers will catch up (IMO they did a while ago actually…

What have you heard about SwiftUI being bloated?

My lived experience. Maybe bloated isn’t the right word, but attention to performance just isn’t there. Try using any swift UI app on iPhone or Mac. Try resizing a swift UI app window on Mac.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#247

Post by orthoxerox »

int_19h wrote: post #88
markus_zhang wrote: post #5

Steven Sinofsky wrote this piece a couple of weeks ago about the same topic: https://x.com/stevesi/status/2036921223150440542

It's very amusing to see Sinofsky of all people all but dumping on .NET and (still?!) not understanding why developers so proactively jumped ship from Win32 & MFC hell to WinForms. Or why the HTML/JS app model in Win8 never really took off. I was in DevDiv during his great WinRT push and the overall feeling I remember was that the guys in Windows had zero clue as to what the devs actually wanted, but were hell bent o…

> It's very amusing to see Sinofsky of all people all but dumping on .NET and (still?!) not understanding why developers so proactively jumped ship from Win32 & MFC hell to WinForms.

Yeah, he's talking about WinForms like it was a whole new thing, but it was a very transparent OO layer over Win32 and extremely similar both to VB and Borland Delphi. It was one of the reasons why .NET survived at all when Linux servers became the default option.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#248

Post by PeterStuer »

As an outsider, it always felt that 'internal team politics' were the root cause of Microsoft's technological downfall. This went far beyond the GUI. In 'flagship' offerings like SharePoint or Skype/Lync/Teams you could see the unmixable partial code-bases brutally forced together under a single product name an foisted upon a user-base baffled by how this could have gone so wrong.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#249

Post by wg0 »

Java wanted to run your code everywhere so they basically wrote a byte code compiler and then wrote one vm per OS/architecture

I never understood.NET's purpose. What problem it exactly went out to solve? Did Microsoft want developers to be able to run their applications everywhere too? Absolutely not.

Sidenote - MFC is the ugliest thing you'll see. Yet they didn't mention another piece of work called ATL. Active Template Library.

WinForms were really decent and that was enough. Keep Win32 API and a managed wrapper around it as WinForms and that would have been more than enough.

.

Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold

#250

Post by noodletheworld »

pjmlp wrote: post #243
steve1977 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean Cocoa and SwiftUI are more consistent in the sense that a lot of stuff automatically adapts when Apple changes styling. And they certainly have less churn and more focus compared to Microsoft. Basically it's been Objective-C and Cocoa since around 2000, later on Swift and then also SwiftUI. That's not too bad for 25 years. And in contrast to MS, you didn't get abandoned when you were sticking to the official f…

Sure, if we ignore the stuff and bugs they still have, the missing features in SwiftUI and performance regressions, or the iPhonisms brought to macOS with Catalyst. The reboot of frameworks based in OpenGL with the Metal rewrite. And many other things I am not bothering with since all those OS System N releases, A/UX UI framework, Teligent based documents,....

Come on, you think SwiftUI has more bugs than the ten different Microsoft frameworks?

There are just more people encountering them because the developers are concentrated on using one thing.

It’s not perfect, but a compared to Microsoft, calling Apple out for having bugs is a little rich isn't it?

I pose to you, if the Microsoft offerings are so compelling, why are the serious players using 3rd party wrappers like QT and Avalonia?

It’s because the first party offerings are not compelling. They’re a disaster dumpster fire. And buggy.

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