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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

#461

Post by skeeter2020 »

geekraver wrote: post #441

Wow, totally ignores the one framework Microsoft developed that was actually a pleasure to use (WinForms). Avalon sucked IMO; it was just a continuation of the fever dream at the time of making everything XML (or XAML in that case). MFC sucked because it was C++. WinForms was that brief Window of “modern programming language with simple, elegant GUI framework”. I know it’s not a popular opinion, and I am sure there w…

WinForms apps always felt "tight" compared to all the other options (the development experience and the end product), and there were lots of 3rd party controls available. If you were building windows desktop app in the early .NET days it sure seemed like the way to go, and those apps lasting so long looks like a supporting data point.

EDIT: just dug out a "memory magic" winforms app I wrote sometime in the early 2000's and ran it no problem, no weird looking non-native UI or long electron startup...

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

#462

Post by StilesCrisis »

sizeofdouble wrote: post #346
9dev wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Folks misunderstand the whole point just because I mention TypeScript. Sure it’s a capable and elegant language. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s a bloated monstrosity on the desktop. Think about it: it transpiles to JavaScript. Even if it’s the most elegant language in the world doesn’t change the fact that it’s a world of bloat. Stacks on stacks on stacks. And yet people are complaining about .Net? Come on. Lol

Why would transpiling change anything? C++ was once transpiled into C. I appreciate that you personally think JavaScript is poorly designed (I mostly agree!) but that doesn't mean it's slow. V8 can do miracles nowadays.

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

#463

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

pjmlp wrote: post #391
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Apple products are so compelling why are so many devs using Electron, React Native and Flutter on macOS That is not how the decision making for cross-platform works. You choose those alternatives knowing that they are crap in many respects, yet accept the trade offs because you want to save money on dev hours.

The whole point was the greatness of Apple platform.

That’s not the point being argued either, nor it being perfect. It’s just about Apple’s UI frameworks being more coherent and consistent across all their own platforms, unlike Microsoft. Even Android developers who’ve done a bit of work on iOS easily agree that Apple’s SDKs are far better designed and behave more predictably than Google’s.

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

#464

Post by SarahC_ »

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…

WinForms - It just works.

Any system that needs a straightforward UI for kicking things off, stopping them, logging them, and dragging data files into them..... WinForms.

Bugfree, hardened by the test of time, works on Windows X, Y and Z.

Everything else is just consumer silver sprinkles, and involves faffing around with multiple config files and obscure layout issues.

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

#465

Post by VirgilShelton »

I used to be a software test engineer at Microsoft in the late 90's and early 2000's. What I learned is that 60% of their business was International because of their language support. Also most of their customers are business customers locked in to using their Windows Server Domain system for corporations. These corporations also run office and Sharepoint and build custom apps using office. This is why they have so many different ways to build apps on Windows. We are not the users they are targeting, they target the enterprise.

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

#466

Post by ack_complete »

WorldMaker wrote: post #156
ack_complete wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most offensive part of the Sinofsky response is this part: > WinRT (2012) - it (or the embodiment in Windows 8) failed in the market but it also showed both the problem and potential solution to building for new markets while respecting the past I can't express how wrong this is. WinRT was the most destructive thing that the Windows team ever did to the OS. It drove a hard stake into Windows, splitting it in half…

I think for Sinofsky the "respecting the past" refers more to WinRT was/is still just Spicy COM under the hood. Most of the article as I read it is about how .NET was a mistake for Windows UI development and a return to (Spicy) COM its savior.

That might have been more significant had the Windows Runtime not been effectively locked off to Metro-style apps. You could technically use it from a desktop app, but almost all of its functionality was only allowed within a Metro-style app, often due to requiring a core window or package identity. Even today the vast majority of useful WinRT APIs, including the entire UI system, require UWP or package identity.

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

#467

Post by vscode-rest »

neutronicus wrote: post #456
vscode-rest wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

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

#468

Post by icedchai »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #309

Desktop, especially Windows, is such a mess. It's 2026. We're running 8+ cores and 32gb ram as standard. We can run super realistic video games at high frame-rates. Yet on the same machine, resizing a window with rectangles in it is laggy on every platform except macOS (where there's a chance it's not laggy).

The bloat is pretty incredible. Consider my Amiga 500 could resize windows without lag on a ~7.1 mhz 68000 and 512K of RAM, almost 40 years ago.

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

#469

Post by ack_complete »

int_19h wrote: post #280
pjc50 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making the main menu bar ALL UPPER CASE I remember that. Especially silly. > Windows RT (not to be confused with WinRT, because Microsoft product naming!) The gold standard will always be "Xbox one series X", designed to be confused with Xbox one series S. Windows RT had one other anti-consumer and anti-developer feature: it was locked down like a Chromebook, so you could only use Store apps on it.

> Windows RT had one other anti-consumer and anti-developer feature: it was locked down like a Chromebook, so you could only use Store apps on it. That was at least in part due to the aforementioned obsession with iPad and generally mobile. One thing that Sinofsky is not wrong about in his post is that the classic Win32 app model is not conductive to good battery life - there's very little there to properly handle th…

The main reason Win32 can't handle automatic background suspension or low-power push notifications is simply that those features haven't been exposed to it. There's nothing preventing a Win32 program from receiving those types of notifications and then being force-ended by the OS if it doesn't respond in time.

When I first started porting programs to Windows ARM64, I didn't have an ARM64 device and had to test in QEMU. It ran extremely slowly, probably 1/50th of real time. All UWP programs like Calculator ran like a slug. But which programs still ran reasonably? Classic WinDbg and Task Manager. Two programs that were still plain Win32.

There are significant issues with Win32, namely its lack of a permissions and isolation and lack of hardware acceleration in the old windowing UI (User/GDI). But the idea that Win32 is inherently power inefficient is, IMO, just BS. Its roots go back to CPUs that were orders of magnitude slower than modern CPUs and there is nothing difficult about making a Win32 program that idles at 0% CPU when not in use.

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

#470

Post by vovavili »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #425
vovavili wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

What about Qt? It is the gold standard for cross-platform desktop UI frameworks. It is (1) performant (C++-based), (2) does not look outdated, and (3) not bug-ridden.

In my experience:

- Qt Widgets worked fine, but looked like a piece of software made in 2013;

- QML looks stylish and is a very nice language, but had a lot of weird bugs.

Neither of these are issues I'd run with if I were to make a web app.

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