Reading this was such a trip. I remember "Programming Windows" had to bribe my uncle to buy it for me. I built my first app using it.
Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
361–370 of 604 posts
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The YouTube app does the exact same thing on Android. I ran into this just yesterday on my gf's phone, as I'd just added her to my family plan, tried to verify the settings on her phone, and it trapped me on an upsell screen for YT Premium that I had to kill the app to get out of.
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#363Desktop, especially Windows, is such a mess. It's 2026. We're running 8+ cores and 32gb ram as standard. We can run super realistic video games at high frame-rates. Yet on the same machine, resizing a window with rectangles in it is laggy on every platform except macOS (where there's a chance it's not laggy).
Sorry but neither Linux or Windows lag to resize windows in any of my 4 machines.
They range from old laptops to a Ryzen 7 9800X3D workstation.
Just yesterday a friend's father needed help setting up their second-hand old laptop with an old i5 processor. I slapped KDE and there was no lag to be seen.
Bonus point that Windows and some Linux distros have sane, intuitive window management. Whereas with macOS I keep seeing someone suggesting some arcane combination of steps to do some basic things with replies to the effect of "OMG thank you so much, this needs to be known by more people!!!"
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows 3.1, with the aproppiated drivers and modern SVGA card, had accelerated 2d graphics. Accelerated GUIs don't even need GPU or 3d.
What does "GPU" mean here? Previous uses of the term seemed to imply "dedicated hardware for improving rendering performance" which the SVGA stuff would seem to fall squarely under.
The term GPU was first coined by Sony for the PlayStation with its 3D capabilities, and has been associated with 3D rendering since. In some products it stood for Geometry Processing Unit, again referring to 3D. Purely 2D graphics coprocessors generally don’t fall under what is considered a GPU.
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#365To quote Steve Jobs: "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products. "
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#366I would recommend Flutter, if Google would not have abandoned it. 12000 open issues on GitHub speak for themselves.
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#367Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
The DOM is very ill-suited for most UI. Too complex and lots of missing features. It’s a whole bag of unneeded code and the resulting UI doesn’t fit anywhere.
> The DOM is very ill-suited for most UI. Too complex and lots of missing features Can you expand on this, because I'm not seeing it myself. The DOM, html+css is very flexible. It easily encompasses most UI. Most UI is some kind of data display, so lists, trees, tables, forms. The need for JS might be what you're complaining about. I think we might be stuck with it as a UI control language forever.
I don't know about "most UI" but it's sure as shit ill-suited for CAD (what I work on).
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, x86 has always been a pretty moving target with many instruction set extensions, especially for various SIMD features. But even something fundamental like `popcnt` has a separate CPUID flag, even though Intel considers it part of SSE4.2. Targeting the broadest possible variant of x86-64 limits you to SSE2, which is really not very capable outside of fairly basic float32 linear algebra. Great for video games, bu…
I doubt that .NET was meant to solve the problem of underlying variation in instruction set of Intel processors because that concern does not exists for 98% of the applications anyway they rarely have to look for the compiler settings and for the rest of the 2%, the compiler flags are huge set of options and that kind of tweaks are NOT available for .NET anyway. Additionally, such applications that want to exploit ce…
The .NET JIT compiler absolutely does query CPUID flags and generates different optimized code depending on available features, as well as the performance profile of each CPU model. This is similar to always passing `-march=native` to GCC.
This can have a huge effect on a wide range of applications, not just those using particular CPU features. For example, each libc implementation typically has a separate implementation `memcpy()` for each set of CPU features.
Re: Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nadella thought he could take the reins and start yelling “Cloud! Cloud! Cloud!” and that would be successful. He doesn’t have a strategy and now that’s becoming apparent.
Nadella took the reins in 2014 and the stock has 10x’d since then. In the same timeframe, the sp500 has 2.5x’d. Sounds pretty successful to me?
Cloud was taking off at the same time. Anybody in his spot would have been successful.