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Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

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Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#251

Post by duped »

timeon wrote: post #199
duped wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's extremely uncharitable. I think slack and discord have pretty great UIs, and that's all "web tech." Figma just IPO'd at a $58 billion valuation - is that not proof their UI is good? If it wasn't good, no one would use it. VS code became the preeminent text editor and IDE over the last decade - all web tech.

Not sure about others but VS Code and Discord are slow and eating too much RAM for what they do.

Does that matter? The UI is great. Hordes of people agree.

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#252

Post by pxoe »

olyjohn wrote: post #249
aprilnya wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Control Panel is definitely a bad example, I do see them working little by little, update by update, to integrate everything into Settings

It's been like 10 years since that settings panel came out with Windows 8. How many more years until it's done?

It's done when you're not visiting old control panel anymore. I wonder what people are even doing regularly enough in control panel for that to be such a problem.

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#253

Post by pjmlp »

hulitu wrote: post #245
pjmlp wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is Win32, that has made us company for several decades, is kind of ok, definitely much better than Motif, the official UI for much UNIXes, before Linux took over.

In Motif, i can set the shadowThickness as much as i want. /s

I rather not deal with Xlib C API.

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#254

Post by pjmlp »

ksec wrote: post #248
marcosdumay wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be fair, Microsoft decided to kill the Windows API that everybody knew, and spent about a decade and half creating a replacement every few years that couldn't actually replace the original thing. It's hard to survive that. Honestly, I don't even know what the GP is talking about when they say the devs don't know "Windows".

>and spent about a decade and half creating a replacement I often feels modern Apple is the same. I mean we are 10 years into Swift, 6 years into Swift UI. And it feels they are still in beta.

And yet it feels more polished than WinUI, that is how bad it has gotten.

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#255

Post by pjmlp »

curt15 wrote: post #190
pjmlp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the WinUI community calls, I would assert all new employees have zero Windows experience and management doesn't care to give them proper skills. Too many questions that any Windows developer would know why the question was being asked, where they either couldn't answer or had puzzled looks on why the questions were being asked in first place. That is also a reason why now there are Webview2 instances all over th…

Do Windows developers use Windows or Mac at work?

Naturally they use Windows, Microsoft designers apparently not any longer.

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#256

Post by spookie »

crinkly wrote: post #183
kbelder wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to ask about Win32. I haven't had to do it in a while, but if I had to write a desktop app in windows, that would be what I would reach for. It's still supported... is their any indication that it won't be for many years to come? Also, it looks better, in my humble opinion. It's probably lacking features that I'm uninterested in.

Still works fine. High DPI stuff is a dick but that’s about it.

Eh, high dpi has always been a mess given the hacks adobe and windows assumed in the past.

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#257

Post by appease7727 »

pjmlp wrote: post #136
appease7727 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly at this point who would seriously use any Microsoft UI framework? They've abandoned 100% of their previous UI frameworks unfinished when they get distracted by a new, shinier framework. Why use a busted incomplete framework missing basic features when there's entire ecosystems of open source cross-platform frameworks being actively maintained and which actually have all the features you need? Really this is…

Forms and WPF are still reasonable options.

Forms is still my go-to for quick one-off and disposable programs. But maily because it's simple and I have a big library of controls and extensions I've built over years to make Forms more complete.

I've also tried WPF, but it's missing very basic controls that I just don't feel like recreating.

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#258

Post by seanmcdirmid »

esseph wrote: post #247
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was already a thing 20 years ago. Students weren’t have any experience with windows, it was something companies used, and today even that has gone away.

I promise you it has not "gone away" which is why Azure is so popular.

What does Azure have to do with windows these days?

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#259

Post by LexiMax »

pxoe wrote: post #252
olyjohn wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been like 10 years since that settings panel came out with Windows 8. How many more years until it's done?

It's done when you're not visiting old control panel anymore. I wonder what people are even doing regularly enough in control panel for that to be such a problem.

I don't use them terribly often, but one thing that old control panel windows did was pack a lot of information into a small amount of space.

Device Manager has that nice tree setup allowing me to see problematic devices a lot quicker.

Drive management has that nice table of physical devices on the top and then partitions on the bottom.

The old-school network adapter page shows me every network device in a single window, real or virtual, and I can mess around with their settings a lot faster with right-click properties.

And of course the services manager allows me to make sure that certain services arent running, like Windows search indexing - I use voidtools Everything instead.

That said, those tend to be the exceptions and not the rules. I've actually been quite pleased with the progression of the settings window over the course of Windows 10 and 11. A special shout out to the new fonts page as it is light years better than what came before.

Re: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework

#260

Post by Kerbiter »

solid_fuel wrote: post #192
marcosdumay wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be fair, Microsoft decided to kill the Windows API that everybody knew, and spent about a decade and half creating a replacement every few years that couldn't actually replace the original thing. It's hard to survive that. Honestly, I don't even know what the GP is talking about when they say the devs don't know "Windows".

Yup. I remember 4 or 5 different frameworks that were supposed to be the future of native UI on windows, but each one after WinForms was harder to use, slower, and less capable than what came before.

I disagree, WPF is quite good to use, and WinForms approach to keeping UI as code is quite moronic. I would say WPF is where it should've stopped.
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