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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

#451

Post by jshier »

n8cpdx wrote: post #246
pipeline_peak wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What have you heard about SwiftUI being bloated?

My lived experience. Maybe bloated isn’t the right word, but attention to performance just isn’t there. Try using any swift UI app on iPhone or Mac. Try resizing a swift UI app window on Mac.

Yeah, it's not bloated, there are just a lot of surprising and weird performance holes, especially on macOS. Even on iOS there's dumb things like, if your List cell's outer view isn't a specific type, List won't optimize for cell reuse, and it will start dequeuing cells for every item in the List eagerly. Wrap your actual cell type with a VStack or something and it will work properly, only dequeuing visible cells. It can be really nice to work with, but man, some of the implicit behavior, performance other otherwise, is shocking.

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

#452

Post by dangus »

IDK, it kind of sounds like from the article's own prose that Project Reunion / WinUI 3 is an overall good thing and that Microsoft actually does have a pretty good vision for the past 5 years at least.

From a user's perspective, I don't really see where the problem is. All my apps look like Windows apps to me, and I also think that includes apps that do their own thing and look their own way. For as long as Windows has been around we've had apps that just don't follow the rules, from RealPlayer to WinZip to iTunes to Spotify.

This idea that all applications must be consistent with each other on one platform is generally a good idea but the downside of not having it that way is not very tangible to most users.

E.g., Steam looks different than every other Windows app. Same with Spotify and Slack and Discord. How does that negatively impact users? Well, not really at all. The consistency is within those apps themselves. I'm comfortable with Steam because I've been using it for 20 years and it's evolved on its own terms.

I could see it being an accessibility problem, but can't figure out any other potential downside.

I also don't think any other platforms have this figured out. See the window corners in macOS Tahoe. Remember how Mac Catalyst apps first looked when that came out? They didn't follow OS conventions at all. Remember when Final Cut Pro 6 didn't look anything like a Mac app? Or GarageBand etc. and their skeuomorphic looks? Linux is no better with a mix of desktop environments, Wayland versus Xorg, etc. Then we look at mobile apps and it's one of the least consistent environments imaginable: you've got a mix of native and frameworks like React Native and Flutter and the rest.

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

#453

Post by croes »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #317
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 r…

In the future it will all be done by AI, no need for GUI. Just write or say what you want to do

Hopefully /s

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

#454

Post by Krssst »

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.

The French are on their way to put a far-right government in power next year, don't count on them.

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

#456

Post by neutronicus »

vscode-rest wrote: post #192
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For all the complaints about modern JavaScript it gives you the pieces to make a very pleasant world in terms of DX and UX There is no such thing as pleasant UX in a web app. The best experience will always be a native app, a web app is at best a port in a storm solution.

Figma is far superior to the native apps it replaced. As is VS Code. Slack.

> As is VS Code.

That is, uh, controversial.

Along both "alleged replacement" and "alleged superiority" axes.

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

#457

Post by InfiniteAscent »

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.

Use JUCE as much as you like, but please, stay away from those 'out-of-the-box' horizontal sliders it seems to prioritize (given how they swarm in the many VSTs made with JUCE).

If sliders are vertical in the real world, there’s a reason for it that Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini summarizes perfectly:

“Most of us […] have our forarms mounted on a pivot we like to call our elbow. That means that moving our hand describes an arc, rather than a straight line. Demanding that pivoted people move a mouse pointer along in a straight line horizontally is just wrong.”

Source: https://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html

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

#458

Post by bgrainger »

mwcampbell wrote: post #327
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, text shaping and layout are complex. My point is that the program wasn't doing anything that should have required a GPU, particularly for the resolutions that were common back then.

The promise was that WPF would use hardware-accelerated libraries such as DirectWrite to put text on the screen even faster than GDI+ (using the CPU) could do. The reality turned out to be quite different: multiple layers of abstraction and just plain inefficient WPF code [1] meant that users needed powerful CPUs and GPUs just to get reasonable performance.

[1] https://faithlife.codes/blog/2019/06/improving-wpf-text-disp...

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

#459

Post by robertoandred »

Iulioh wrote: post #199
pjmlp wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a 70's child, in computing since the mid 80s you made me almost spill my Monday coffee. What a laugh, do you want the examples on Apple's side?

The evergreen question of "how do you go back and/or close an app on IOS?"

You swipe backward. Been that way for twenty years.

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

#460

Post by sumtechguy »

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…

totally.

MS ended up where it was at because there was basically NO upgrade path between the few different GUI frameworks they had. They broke the whole thing in 2002 when they decided .NET was the way.

You had to basically retool your whole GUI for whatever they were pushing at the time. Then they basically abandoned win32 GUI items and put them in mothballs. Then change their minds every other year.

No sane person is going to pick that model of building an application. So the applications kinda stagnated at whatever GUI level they came into being with. No one wanted to touch it. If I am doing that why am I sticking with windows? I can get the same terrible effect on the web/mobile and have a better reach.

Even their flagship application windows is all over the place. If you click on the right thing you can get GUI's that date back to windows95. Or maybe you might get a whitespaced out latest design. It is all over the place. It has been 10 years at this point. They should have that dialed in years ago.

I do not think Google will be able to pay attention long enough to have a stable GUI. Apple maybe. As for MS you can see it from the outside there are several different competing groups all failing at it.

MS needs another 'service pack 2' moment. Where they focus on cleaning up the mess they have. Clean up the GUI. Fix the speed items. Fixup the out of the box experience (should not take 4gig of used memory just to start up). Clean up the mountain of weird bug quirks.

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