141–150 of 184 posts
Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits. It looks and works so intuitively.
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At the same time it's common to hear "how does this not support high DPI?" or "How does this app not have a dark mode, it's 2024!" etc. Modern toolkits just do a lot of stuff that older toolkits didn't. Some times at the expense of not being as quick to get off the ground as VB was. The original winforms implementation in the early 2000's was pretty close to VB in terms of efficiency but its warts were numerous, e.g.…
It used to have darkmode++ back in the day, because windows allowed you to just choose all the controls colors in any way you wanted. Of course it lacks features we want today, especially things we are used to from the web, like highlighting fields with errors in them etc., but I often think new features can't entirely explain why the newer toolkits are so much less ergonomically useable.
So nice to see this! I was one of the original developers of the "visual" side of Visual Basic. It was called Ruby at the time (no relation to the programming language) and was going to be a customizable shell for Windows 3.0. The idea was that individual Windows users would create their own personal desktop using our visual editor and "gizmos" (later called by the much more boring name "controls") to make their own…
I'm the guy with the enthusiastic thread earlier on in this post. I'd love to sit down and chat with you for an hour on zoom and hear all about those times, which we could then we could post the video on here - I think people would appreciate.
I have absolutely zero experience in interviewing people, nor do I have a media channel of any kind, but I promise I'd do my best to ask interesting questions. If that sounds interesting, shoot me an email (you can find it in my profile).
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Nothing beats a clean windows 2000 install
Almost clean. One trip to Start Menu settings to disable the awful “Personalized Menus”. One more trip to Folder Options to disable “Hide file extensions for known file types” and to enable “launch folder windows in a separate process”.
That never should have been a thing.
Naming files "totally-not-a-virus.jpg.exe" never would have been a problem if extensions weren't hidden by default.
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Mine was "How to Create Adventure Games" by Christopher Lampton (1986) at my municipal library. BASIC code that I entered into my dad's computer, which had QBASIC pre-installed.
Look! https://ia902300.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/4/...
So nice to see this! I was one of the original developers of the "visual" side of Visual Basic. It was called Ruby at the time (no relation to the programming language) and was going to be a customizable shell for Windows 3.0. The idea was that individual Windows users would create their own personal desktop using our visual editor and "gizmos" (later called by the much more boring name "controls") to make their own…
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Dark mode would have been trivial with old toolkits because they used standardize look and feel. In fact motif lets you customize the color scheme through a text file. Which can make each app fit the appearance of the given desktop. Old guis also had more accssibility features. The only thing modern ones have going for them is animation and visual customization.
Old toolkits make it much easier to set the text color of some label to #444, which looks fine on a light background, but is very hard to read on a black background. Setting it to some well-defined MutedText color requires more effort, and it requires the toolkit vendor to have thought about named colors in the first place (and if there are named colors, they might not be meaningful like Muted or Success, but instead…
Other point is noted. But let’s compare the alternative:
1. Fiddle with a config file for each app for a week. Distro includes this in dark mode set. 2. Each app writes custom code to listen for and adapt to dark mode events.
Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits. It looks and works so intuitively.
Taste moved towards elaborate, deeply styled designs that communicated branding and away from familiar widgets that didn't call attention to themselves as all. It turned out that focusing on a splashy and idiosyncratic brand not only excited prospective new users but inhibited them from going elsewhere since it made transitions more awkward and frustrating. That made more money, more easily, than focusing on user eff…
My taste did not; I experienced this shift as the triumph of designer ego over humble usability, and a little bit of my youthful love for computing died in the process.
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> This is fairly similar to how Interface Builder in Xcode works for macOS and iOS apps. Having extensive experience with both: Hard, hard disagree. They might look similar in static screenshots but work completely differently. Totally agree with your second point and I wish Microsoft would have addressed that. Maybe they have. The last time I messed with their stuff I was writing XAML. Anyone know if they brought RA…
So - to answer you two points: Interface Builder was a lot more like VB and Delphi in the past, but around the time of iOS 3, Apple completely broke the UI programming metaphor in it. It used to be all drag and drop (with quirks) but actions were like event handlers and outlets like events. Before it was "code first" you could do it all in the UI. I used it quite a bit before XCode existed (XCode used to be ProjectBu…
I guess I can see your point. I started with IB on OPENSTEP, then onto macOS in the 10.1 days. But even back then, I still think the feel wasn't quite the same, from my subjective viewpoint.
I keep having these strong urges of using Windows again and creating WinForms apps. But then I go and use Windows for a day and the lack of polish is so jarring. But gosh, Microsoft development was almost always fun.