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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

#471

Post by iamcalledrob »

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 These tend to be either less performant, look outdated or are bug-ridden.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 It is (1) performant (C++-based), (2) does not look outdated, and (3) not bug-ridden.

Qt apps don't feel great on macOS, though it's by far the best for mac-ish UI. Dropbox was Qt for a long time and I'd argue it worked well for them. Its easy to fall into "uncanny valley".

On Linux, Qt apps feel a bit off in GNOME, though you can never satisfy everyone as its the wild west.

I think Qt also suffers from not really being anyone's favourite.

On the one hand, you have web developers who tend to not really appreciate the nuance of the desktop as a platform. They're not going to advocate for Qt, it's not CSS/HTML/JS.

On the other hand, you have native Mac developers who love Apple's toolkits (AppKit, maybe SwiftUI). They're not going to advocate for Qt either.

Lastly, you have native Windows developers who have been burned so many times they don't advocate for anything in life anymore.

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

#472

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

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…

I know this isn't really your main point but I don't think they've been trying to reduce complexity but rather increasing ease-of-use for the end-user*. Those things are often completely at odds with each other in software as I'm sure you know.

*well, that seems to have been their goal in the past; nowadays it just seems like they've been trying to funnel windows users to their other products and forcing copilot into everything.

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

#473

Post by senko »

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…

GTK 2, GTK 3, or GTK 4?

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

#474

Post by bjourne »

icedchai wrote: post #468
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.

Resizing was based on a wireframe system and windows weren't repainted during resizes.

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

#475

Post by webstrand »

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.

Container tabs, independent proxy config (chrome only respects system-wide proxy), vertical tabs, and functional adblockers are the four big features for me.

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

#476

Post by shiandow »

kerblang wrote: post #443
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…

> This meant I could start the computer, log in, potentially start and use several applications and only then turn on the screen. I mean... well... responsiveness matters to me too, and I am impressed by such inspired productivity, but... I'm also confused. Why not turn on the screen - the monitor, right? Now thinking about how gui lag might impact the sight-impaired, tangential as that is...

It was meant as an example, not a productivity tip ;-)

Anyway the real point is that it's just easier to use something if you don't need constant visual feedback. Being able to use something blind is more than just an accessibility issue it is just better in general.

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

#477

Post by iamcalledrob »

hu3 wrote: post #363
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).

Sorry but neither Linux or Windows lag to resize windows in any of my 4 machines. They range from old laptops to a Ryzen 7 9800X3D workstation. Just yesterday a friend's father needed help setting up their second-hand old laptop with an old i5 processor. I slapped KDE and there was no lag to be seen. Bonus point that Windows and some Linux distros have sane, intuitive window management. Whereas with macOS I keep seei…

If we're talking a simple "hello world" window then sure, you can resize that at 60fps on pretty much any system.

But most nontrivial apps can't re-layout at 60fps (or 30fps even).

They either solve it by (A) allowing the window to resize faster than the content, leaving coloured bars when enlarging [electron], or (B) stuttering or dropping frames when resizing.

A pleasant exception to this I've noticed is GTK4/Adwaita on GNOME. Nautilus, for me at least, resizes at 60fps, even when in a folder of thumbnails.

On the Mac side, AppKit, especially with manual `layoutSubviews` math easily hits 60fps too. Yes it was more complex, but you had to do it and it was FAST.

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

#478

Post by WorldMaker »

ack_complete wrote: post #466
WorldMaker wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Package Identity isn't that different from Signed COM Registration of the ancient past. Microsoft built up a lot of dislike from it by building it "sandbox-first", but the core of it still isn't that different from COM's ancient footpaths, at least to the COM diehards that hate .NET and didn't learn near enough from .NET's battles with the same things in terms of package signing, CAS (Code Access Security), and the GAC (Global Assembly Cache).

"Sandbox-first" even made some sense as a direction to work because it is harder to add a sandbox after the fact than to start with one, which is one of the core lessons learned from XP trying to sandbox some of the insecurities in Win32 and getting caught in a lot of complications. (The "sandbox-first" of UWP wasn't even that different under the hood from the XP "sandbox" of Folder/Registry Redirection, just a little better hardened.) Microsoft needed a lot better messaging up front if they had expected to allow more apps to leave the sandbox eventually. But Microsoft probably did believe the UWP sandbox was a better and safer experience for consumers.

But yeah, what's left of Package Identity outside of the sandbox feels like it includes several classic mistakes from .NET's CAS/GAC era, and also seems to point out that Sinofsky was wrong about WinRT "respecting the past" when it failed to learn from that era because it didn't trust .NET's history.

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

#479

Post by anthk »

Dwedit wrote: post #419
anthk wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mono supported WinForms. But IDK how did they integrate it with the CIL.

But for sure they used WineLib.

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

#480

Post by loeber »

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…

It's because we went from the Desktop environment, where rules were well-documented and standardized, to the Web/Mobile environment, where rules had to be reinvented and, for the most part, were not.

We've lost design idioms, which is a huge tax on users everywhere. I've been mad about this for years: https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-desig...

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