This article smells so strongly of AI that I'd be surprised if the author did much of any writing.
The summary of various frameworks and languages available is very concise and informative though.
Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
321–330 of 604 posts
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#322The funny thing is that Joel Spolsky predicted most of it 20 years ago[0]:
>> Jon Udell found a slide from Microsoft labelled “How Do I Pick Between Windows Forms and Avalon?” and asks, “Why do I have to pick between Windows Forms and Avalon?” A good question, and one to which he finds no great answer.
And:
>> Which means, suddenly, Microsoft’s API doesn’t matter so much. Web applications don’t require Windows.
What he didn't see is, however, Azure would become the money printer for Microsoft and made all these no longer matter.
[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#323I stuck with WinForms. It was the last tech that made your app look and feel like Windows app.
Everything that came later was basically a struggle to make something that Electron actually delivered.
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm doesn't that sound like Apple's Tahoe/iOS 26? Effects upon effects upon more effects.
iOS 26 runs surprisingly smooth on my iPhone 12 Pro Max though.
Runs like crap on my daughter's 12 mini.
Actually what does "surprisingly smooth" mean? Better than you expected? Or actually smooth?
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft had a lot of great talent suffering from a lack of leadership and coherent vision. They foreshadowed everything wrong with Big Tech today.
what surprised me is how different the rendering architecture is for each framework. Win32 -> message loops & GDI Winforms -> managed C# via P/Invoke WPF -> throwse all away and uses DirectX UWP -> Appcontainer sandboxing WinUI -> decouples from OS entirely This visual breakdown helped me to see it clearly - https://vectree.io/c/evolution-of-windows-gui-frameworks-fro...
As far as I remember, WinForms is just a thin wrapper around Win32 with a message loop, i.e. not all that different.
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#326What I find must puzzling is that everyone seems to just be violating basic rules that had been in place for ages. Things like: - If you can't respond to a UI event wait until you can - Menus should be tree structures - Pressing alt should underline the hotkeys you need to access anything clickable As well as just basic responsiveness or predictability. A 2000 era windows application may not have been pretty, and may…
We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten. Not out of malice, but out of a misguided aim to reduce complexity and achieve consistency with the web. I would argue that desktop is the platform for power users, and its future depends on them. The keyboard shortcuts, the micro-interactions, the window management -- this stuff is all important when you're using a system for 8+ hours per day. Yet we r…
This is why, for me, year of the Linux desktop was 2008. It's been atrocious since then.
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#327> WPF was good As someone who saw what impact WPF had on average users running average hardware in the late 2000s to early 2010s, I disagree. In 2011, my brother was in seminary, using an average Windows Vista-era laptop that he had been given in 2008. When he was home for Christmas in 2011, we were talking about his laptop, and he told me that the Logos Bible software ran sluggishly on that laptop. He said something…
> Bear in mind, this is software that basically just displays text Displaying text is surprisingly hard, as one can easily find out if ones dives into the big rabbit hole of font rendering.
Yes, text shaping and layout are complex. My point is that the program wasn't doing anything that should have required a GPU, particularly for the resolutions that were common back then.
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#328[dead]
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#329Earlier 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.
It's not just mental, as you age you lose moisture in your skin and with that accuracy with touch devices.
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#330My coherent GUI strategy: just use JUCE.
Invested in it, shipped it, seen it solve the cross-platform problem beautifully.
Can just write C++, and see it running everywhere.
The JUCE GUI capabilities are more than adequate for many, many things.
There are other platform-scaffolded cross-platform frameworks. JUCE is cromulantly FNORD.