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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

#411

Post by cogman10 »

mghackerlady wrote: post #406
cogman10 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, a striking difference between windows and linux at this point is that the linux UI frameworks are hyper stable. If I want to make a linux desktop app, I'll choose QT or GTK. Heck, if I want to make a windows and macOS app, I'll probably choose QT or GTK. What do I chose with Windows? Who knows. It literally changes every time I look into it. That's just insane. It's gotten so bad that probably the right way to…

win32 seems to be stable, albeit a bit dated. It's good enough for small things (at least good enough for m$ to use)

All the various windows UI frameworks are stable, but not supported and not receiving new updates.

That's the problem.

And what makes matters worse is because of all the shifts, the documentation throughout MS is in just varying states of outdated. For example, this document which recommends using UWP [1] to handle high dpi problems. But of course, UWP (which was the right way to do gui in Win 10) is now defunct for win ui.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/hidpi/high-d...

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

#412

Post by l72 »

skydhash wrote: post #80
jemmyw wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to get hung up on this native vs web thing. But when it comes down to it, it's just one renderer or another unless you're actually drawing the controls yourself pixel by pixel. The sticking point is following the system style / theme. But all the popular desktop OSs seem to have deviated on this so much themselves I'm not sure how important this is.

The DOM is very ill-suited for most UI. Too complex and lots of missing features. It’s a whole bag of unneeded code and the resulting UI doesn’t fit anywhere.

Why don't we have more great UI toolkits for the canvas?

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

#413

Post by SyneRyder »

hermitcrab wrote: post #378
SyneRyder wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think I prefer that JUCE is a one-off licence at $800 (for small business) and that they offer a 30% discount if you want to upgrade when they release a new major framework version. I'd rather not get locked into Qt's annual $618/subscription every year just to continue distribution & development.

But Qt has the bonus of also running on HaikuOS, and I've definitely seen more business apps in Qt (pretty sure 010 Editor is Qt).

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

#414

Post by PaulHoule »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #127
judah wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? There are other options besides "web app" and "only one OS". A cross platform app which uses something like GTK or QT will be a massively better experience for your users, one a web app cannot hope to equal.

I know one of the GTK developers who dropped out of my research group in the 1990s who's been in charge of triaging tickets and he's the kind of guy who doesn't care if there is just 1.05:1 contrast between text and background and will refuse a one-line patch to make menus render right in rootless X windows because he wants to punish you for doing things in a way he thinks is wrong.

And he probably wonders why it is never "the year of the Linux desktop" but hey it is OK because Red Hat Linux is something enterprises subject their users to and if it had the slightest bit of flair customers would complain.

So when I hear GTK I think Nein Danke!

In general Linux has the kind of fanbois problem that MacOS had maybe 10 years ago. There are so many things that still "just don't work" after years and they never get fixed because you can live without them. For instance I can tell you how to install some package like

   sudo apt-get install mypackage
and that's all! I can make 10 pages of screenshots to tell you to click and click and click and click and click to install "mypackage" with the GUI [1] and you may wind up looking at a spinner for 10 minutes or longer (eventually you give up) and you might wind up corrupting your package database and not being able to install or update anything until you look up how to rebuild it. The Linux desktop is stuck with having done the 20% of the work that gets it 80% done and never does the rest of the work because you can use the command line anyway.

[1] and you still might misunderstand it and need intensive tech support

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

#415

Post by starik36 »

cogman10 wrote: post #393
ZuLuuuuuu wrote: post #342

2 things Microsoft failed to do in the last 15 years are: 1) They abandoned their mobile phone, tablet, and wearable strategy. So, today if you develop a native Windows application, it will only work on desktops and laptops. That is it. It is not attractive for a developer to learn a whole new UI framework just to target a single form factor. And I don't know if there is any solution for this at this point, they shou…

Yeah, a striking difference between windows and linux at this point is that the linux UI frameworks are hyper stable. If I want to make a linux desktop app, I'll choose QT or GTK. Heck, if I want to make a windows and macOS app, I'll probably choose QT or GTK. What do I chose with Windows? Who knows. It literally changes every time I look into it. That's just insane. It's gotten so bad that probably the right way to…

On Windows, I would chose WinForms. Even today, even over WPF. It's as stable as QT and GTK, still supported, and has a large community of contributors and 3rd party vendors.

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

#417

Post by Gracana »

MichaelRo wrote: post #387
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…

Well, Alt+Tab in Windows is supposed to switch windows. That's unless you're in Microsoft Edge where obviously, it switches tabs. Inconsistent and annoying.

I hate this too. You can turn it off. In Settings, go to System->Multitasking and change "Show tabs from apps when snapping or pressing Alt+Tab" to "Don't show tabs."

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

#418

Post by okanat »

mghackerlady wrote: post #406
cogman10 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, a striking difference between windows and linux at this point is that the linux UI frameworks are hyper stable. If I want to make a linux desktop app, I'll choose QT or GTK. Heck, if I want to make a windows and macOS app, I'll probably choose QT or GTK. What do I chose with Windows? Who knows. It literally changes every time I look into it. That's just insane. It's gotten so bad that probably the right way to…

win32 seems to be stable, albeit a bit dated. It's good enough for small things (at least good enough for m$ to use)

WPF is also stable. Microsoft's UI strategy is similar to keeping all of Motif, GTK2, Qt5 alive while engineering new stuff into Qt6 without deprecating anything.

Btw Linux UI is not by any measure stable. It is the furthest thing from stable.

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

#419

Post by Dwedit »

anthk wrote: post #260
Dwedit wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WinForms is a layer built on top of raw Win32. So it's not portable. Even though Wine exists, Win32 calls can only be made from Win32 programs, not native Linux programs. So a WinForms app using the latest dotnet would need to run the Windows version of dotnet under Wine, and not use the Linux version of dotnet.

Mono used to have libwine embedded. You know, libwine exists as a library running and compiling Win32 natively under Unix. Instead of PE binaries you would run ELF Linux ones, but with nearly the same outcome.

Every time I tried following alone with the winelib/winemaker documentation, I always ended up with an ELF that had to be invoked using "wine" to run. Nothing that could self-load any of the wine dependencies.

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

#420

Post by [deleted] »

pndy wrote: post #319
gdhkgdhkvff wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]
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