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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

#311

Post by 9dev »

cedilla wrote: post #285
sizeofdouble wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, things like Electron are quite literally the problem! All of people’s modern desktop woes begin and end at the browser. Here’s why: the late 2010’s push into the cloud made JavaScript all-the-rage. A language the creator made in pretty much a weekend coding session. There naturally is major business incentives powering this. SaaS made things MUCH easier for delivering software. Fast forward 15 years and MSF…

That may be how JavaScript started, but unless your claim is that JavaScript hasn't changed at all in the thirty years or so since then, your argument is a complete non-sequitur.

Yeah, thank you. Also, JavaScript today means TypeScript—an arguably extremely capable type system actively developed by Microsoft—and several, modern runtimes with a big standard library and solid asynchronous primitives. There are a lot worse scripting languages out there.

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

#312

Post by bayindirh »

pndy wrote: post #310
bayindirh wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Android has both a swipe gesture or a widget that simulates buttons that used to be at the bottom of the screen

...and iOS has both an arrow at the top left and a swipe gesture. I can't see how they are that different.

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

#313

Post by VorpalWay »

seltzered_ wrote: post #169
mwcampbell wrote: post #129

> 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…

A notable example I remember from around 2010 was when Evernote dropped WPF, supposedly due to blurry text issues but probably also performance (remember when we called it EverBloat?) Can't find the original blog post about it but here's a couple mentions of it: - https://www.edandersen.com/p/evernote-has-no-patience-drops-... - https://www.reddit.com/r/csharp/comments/x0nu7h/comment/im9k...

Blurry fonts was my main issue with WPF. I get headaches from blurry text and the colour bleeding from ClearType just makes the headache worse.

Fortunately for me, I had mostly switched to Linux by that time already, where it was at the time relatively easy to just enable grey scale AA with full hinting.

In recent years this has gotten worse again with modern software incorrectly assuming everyone has a High DPI monitor. My trick has been to use bitmap fonts with no AA, but that broke in recent versions of electron, where bitmap fonts are now rendered blurry. So I had to stay on an old version of vscode from last year, and I will be looking to switch to another editor (high time anyway for other reasons).

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

#314

Post by raincole »

wg0 wrote: post #249

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 Temp…

> I never understood.NET's purpose. What problem it exactly went out to solve?

Java. Java is the problem .NET attempted to solve.

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

#315

Post by DrinkyBird »

antiframe wrote: post #44
api wrote: post #31

Nobody really has. Apple comes the closest but they keep rug pulling it in weird ways. Windows and Mac in the 90s had very consistent GUIs with such consistency in things like keyboard shortcuts that apps could easily be learned. The term “intuitive” was king in the realm of UI design. Then the web hit and all that died.

Not nobody. KDE has a functional and consistent GUI.

KDE has the newer QML-based Kirigami and older Qt Widgets frameworks that are not consistent. Widgets apps absolutely look like actual desktop apps (menus, toolbars, dialogs), Kirigami apps look like mobile apps (nav bars, hamburger menus, page-based navigation). There is definitely a visual and functional inconsistency between the two, even if they use the same theme pretty well.

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

#317

Post by iamcalledrob »

shiandow wrote: post #277

What 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 risk desktop experiences becoming less useful due to the UI becoming "dumber" as we keep shoehorning websites onto the desktop. Website UI is dumb. It's mouse driven, keyboard is an afterthought. There's no consistency, and you have to re-invent the wheel every time to get the details right (almost never happens).

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

#318

Post by baudmusic »

judah wrote: post #63
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

The churn would have been much worse if Microsoft was rolling out successful GUI framework after GUI framework. As it is you can still write a Win32 app if that pleases you, or still write .NET (and damn that runtime download!) Microsoft has bought into ‘make a web app’ since 1988, they introduced AJAX, they got flexbox and grid into CSS and numerous HTML 5 features to support application UIs. They ‘frikin bought npm…

Your post is touching on a key question: why write a Windows-specific app? I'm a developer who has built and published several apps. I want the biggest possible audience for those apps. Why would I limit those apps to Windows? (Or even to any single platform/OS?) Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS? Doesn't…

[flagged]

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

#319

Post by pndy »

gdhkgdhkvff wrote: post #82
drob518 wrote: post #73

Earlier 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?

Maybe financially MS is successful but at the cost of flagship product becoming adware and people fleeing slowly away

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

#320

Post by aleph_minus_one »

mwcampbell wrote: post #129

> 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.

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