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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

#371

Post by hliyan »

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%.

Sometimes this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is the novice users who, over time, become power users through repetitive usage. If there are no user efficiency gains to be had through experience in a UI, then it just prevents the emergence of power users. Users just have to wait until a product manager or designer somewhere notices their pain and create a new feature through 10x the effort it would have taken to simply maintain the lower level shortcuts (e.g. keyboard accelerators, simple step automations).

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

#372

Post by iamcalledrob »

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%.

Personally, its not so much about customisation as it is consistency, quality, and attention to detail.

Being able to keyboard through menus as standard. Focus being deeply considered and always working as expected.

Compact UI elements -- in the 90s/00s we decided buttons should be about 22px tall. Then suddenly they doubled in size.

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

#373

Post by vovavili »

rigonkulous wrote: post #333
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…

>We've ended up in a world where power users have been forgotten. I think its more like the OS vendors have stopped being operating system vendors, and are now - instead - vendors of eyeballs to advertisers . The less the user is GUI'ing, the more they are just watching, placid, whatever else is on their screen. For native apps to survive, they need to not be platform-specific - i.e. web apps, which require a browser…

>i.e. dissuaded from using native, but rather bespoke, UI frameworks.

Based on my experience, I would be quite reluctant to rely on any non-native cross-platform desktop UI framework that is not web-based. These tend to be either less performant, look outdated or are bug-ridden.

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

#374

Post by Zigurd »

Not just Windows. If you use an Android smart phone (and it might be just as bad on iPhone I just don't know) you see AI features occupying the last scraps of user interface real estate in the form of edge gestures that half the time get me an unwanted AI overlay UI when I was looking for the app switcher. Steve Jobs is spinning in his grave, and the people who authored the original Mac UI guidelines are cringing. Nobody seems to be willing to say that there's no room at the inn, or that somebody's idea has to get evicted before a new idea can occupy space.

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

#375

Post by tantalor »

pjmlp wrote: post #268
noodletheworld wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, you think SwiftUI has more bugs than the ten different Microsoft frameworks? There are just more people encountering them because the developers are concentrated on using one thing . It’s not perfect, but a compared to Microsoft , calling Apple out for having bugs is a little rich isn't it? I pose to you, if the Microsoft offerings are so compelling, why are the serious players using 3rd party wrappers like…

If Apple products are so compelling why are so many devs using Electron, React Native and Flutter on macOS, to the point it deserved being mentioned at WWDC 2025 State of the Nation Keynote? My point was don't throw stones when having a big glass roof as well. Apple isn't the perfection you make out to be, also has a rich history of failures, and only did not went bankrupt due to sheer luck of doing the right decisio…

They use React Native and Flutter because they want to target more than just MacOS/iOS

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

#376

Post by ethbr1 »

encom wrote: post #355
bityard wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's tragic how mismanaged it is.

Is it mismanaged? Sure, they spend a fair amount on administration. Sure, they spend about 10% on Mozilla Foundation stuff. But they still spend ~2/3 of revenue on software development.

And they're somewhat stuck between a rock and a hard place.

If they try to evolve their current platform, power users bitch. If they don't evolve their current platform, they lose casual users to ad-promoted alternatives (Chrome and Edge).

And they don't really have the money to do a parallel ground-up rewrite.

The most interesting thing I could see on the horizon is building a user-owned browsing agent (in the AI sense), but then they'd get tarred and feathered for chasing AI.

Part of Mozilla's problem is that the browser is already pretty figured out. After tabs and speed and ad blocking, there weren't any killer features.

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

#377

Post by bombcar »

ShroudedNight wrote: post #343
Zardoz84 wrote: post #196

Earlier 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.

Most people consider GPU to mean "3D accelerator" though technically it refers to any coprocessor that can do work "for" the main system at the same time.

GPU-accelerated GUI usually refers to using the texture mapping capabilities of a 3D accelerator for "2D" GUI work.

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

#378

Post by hermitcrab »

SyneRyder wrote: post #336
rigonkulous wrote: post #330

My coherent GUI strategy: just use JUCE. Invested in it, shipped it, seen it solve the cross-platform problem beautifully. Can just write C++, and see it running everywhere. The JUCE GUI capabilities are more than adequate for many, many things. There are other platform-scaffolded cross-platform frameworks. JUCE is cromulantly FNORD.

That sounds intriguing - are there examples of desktop apps (eg productivity apps) that are made with JUCE? I'm already very familiar with JUCE in VST plugins, I have hundreds of VSTs made with JUCE and I love their UIs. But I don't think I've ever seen it for a standalone business application? The JUCE pricing is certainly far more reasonable than Qt.

Qt Small Business pricing is very reasonable.

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

#379

Post by shmeeed »

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%.

>their telemetry showed that few users used them

I wonder if they ever stopped to think that power users are the ones that disable telemetry immediately upon install.

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

#380

Post by markus_zhang »

int_19h wrote: post #88
markus_zhang wrote: post #5

Steven Sinofsky wrote this piece a couple of weeks ago about the same topic: https://x.com/stevesi/status/2036921223150440542

It's very amusing to see Sinofsky of all people all but dumping on .NET and (still?!) not understanding why developers so proactively jumped ship from Win32 & MFC hell to WinForms. Or why the HTML/JS app model in Win8 never really took off. I was in DevDiv during his great WinRT push and the overall feeling I remember was that the guys in Windows had zero clue as to what the devs actually wanted, but were hell bent o…

I have always been tempted to use WPF but I’m reluctant to learn a whole new language for side projects. Especially nowadays C# seems to be as huge as C++. Oh well maybe I should grit through the beginning phase.
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