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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

#351

Post by bityard »

marcos100 wrote: post #331
iamcalledrob wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Mozilla removed a lot of power-user features and customization from Firefox claiming that their telemetry showed that few users used them. That's the reality now, nobody wants to develop and maintain things for the 1%.

Browsers like Vivaldi that cater to power users are gaining in popularity. They are not trying to be the next Chrome, they are just out to serve their niche well.

Firefox has nothing to differentiate itself from Chrome at this point.

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

#352

Post by wg0 »

simonask wrote: post #259
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…

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 certain underlying processor's instruction set have no way to do so without detecting CPUID and landing into so called "unmanaged code" because .NET is all about very high level IR that even has object oriented features as well.

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

#353

Post by kristofferR »

bityard wrote: post #351
marcos100 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla removed a lot of power-user features and customization from Firefox claiming that their telemetry showed that few users used them. That's the reality now, nobody wants to develop and maintain things for the 1%.

Browsers like Vivaldi that cater to power users are gaining in popularity. They are not trying to be the next Chrome, they are just out to serve their niche well. Firefox has nothing to differentiate itself from Chrome at this point.

Try installing Sidebery or a good adblocker on Chrome.

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

#354

Post by layer8 »

liendolucas wrote: post #347
iamcalledrob wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you become a power user you realize that nothing matches the power of the command line. And at that point you also realize that are better OSes that allow you to fully explode the true computing power that is terribly limited and constrained by a GUI.

Nonsense. Do you read and write your email using the command line? I use Mutt and Vim for that, and that’s not the command line. GUI with power-user support is just as efficient as Mutt and Vim. Did you use curl to read this thread and submit your comment? I use Firefox with Vimium C, which allows most web pages to be navigated and operated efficiently by keyboard.

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

#355

Post by encom »

bityard wrote: post #351
marcos100 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla removed a lot of power-user features and customization from Firefox claiming that their telemetry showed that few users used them. That's the reality now, nobody wants to develop and maintain things for the 1%.

Browsers like Vivaldi that cater to power users are gaining in popularity. They are not trying to be the next Chrome, they are just out to serve their niche well. Firefox has nothing to differentiate itself from Chrome at this point.

>Firefox has nothing

Not only that, but for a time, Firefox seemed to be copying everything Chrome did, maybe as a way to stop the exodus of users. But people who wanted Chrome-y things were already using it, and people who didn't might as well, because Firefox was becoming indistinguishable from it.

God I wish Mozilla would be made great again. It's tragic how mismanaged it is.

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

#356

Post by grandpoobah »

bananaflag wrote: post #4

This barely mentions Windows Forms, which is the cleanest and fastest way to code Windows GUI apps. A few years ago, I wanted to prototype something quick and I wrote it in Windows Forms over C# (all code, no visual editor).

I haven't touched it in years but I remember moving to WPF because it had a better answer for binding UI elements to data. But while WPF does have an answer, everything is so fucking verbose and clunky.

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

#357

Post by ShroudedNight »

ioseph wrote: post #329
teekert wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that what's going on? So many touch gestures seem to rely on landing in the right 2mm diameter area, but the minimum reliable resolution for touch seems to be a 4mm diameter circle. It's even worse for my father, even though cognitively, he would have no trouble understanding the hypothetical requirement. It's also noticeably worse during the depths of winter.

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

#358

Post by grandpoobah »

belkinpower wrote: post #92
nusl wrote: post #68

This article smells so strongly of AI that I'd be surprised if the author did much of any writing.

It starts out alright, and then ends with a pile of classic Claude-isms and an unreadable slop graphic. Like the author got bored of writing it halfway through.

"Unreadable slop graphic" xD

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

#359

Post by atombender »

cloud-oak wrote: post #242
Iulioh wrote: post #199

Earlier 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 has non-standard and nonsensical UX on every platform. It's Google's fault, nothing to do with Apple.

Case in point: The YouTube app for Apple TV. Everything (pausing, playing, changing subtitles) has been done opposite to the standard player found in every other app. You cannot use the main button to pause and resume, for example. Recently they broke swiping. Normally, you swipe the remote to navigate between UI elements such as squares in a grid or in lists with a light touch. It's very fluid, like a touch screen. But the YT app has added severe "inertia" to touch gestures, and you now have to "fling" your finger on the remote trackpad to navigate. Everything feels syrupy and stuck.

YouTube and Amazon's Prime TV app are the two worst apps I've ever used on Apple TV. I believe they both use some non-native UI toolkit that doesn't respect native OS conventions and doesn't even try to. Pretty incredible given the size and budgets of these companies.

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

#360

Post by mapontosevenths »

exe34 wrote: post #206
Krssst wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end state of genAI could as well be a few billionaires being their enterprise and everybody else being unemployed or working at the factory. Robots are not there yet (far from it) and someone needs to build and maintain the thing as well as food for everyone. High unemployment could drive salaries down and make lots of thing unavailable to the common people while making humans cheaper than automation for boring m…

The French will lead the way.

I imagine that the rabble will need to eat only a few before the rest catch on.
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