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Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

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Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#51

Post by Onavo »

JohnDeHope wrote: post #17
decasia wrote: post #6

It's a neat project. Write cross platform desktop apps in C. Presumably it would not have been very usable in practice in the late 1980s, because of all the OTHER system interfaces that still weren't portable, even if the windowing system was available in a portable way. I can remember the subsequent period in which Java desktop apps were relatively common. They had cross platform UI by default. But the problem was:…

> cross platform GUIs are ugly by default, compared to fully native desktop apps, because they don't entirely replicate the affordances or the style of the platform; I think this is an implementation detail. It's up to the software stack whether it leaves off before drawing the UI elements on screen, or goes ahead and takes on that responsibility too. The wxWidgets toolkit uses the runtime platform's UI, so it does n…

> Java Swing took on the task of drawing the UI elements on the screen in its own style.

Sun/Oracle also cheaped out by not having designers. If you see Flutter, they are able to recreate all of the platform specific widgets purely by having design engineers eyeball the implementations until they replicate the exact color and timing of every animation. Oracle/Sun was cheap and lazy.

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#52

Post by CyberDildonics »

decasia wrote: post #6

It's a neat project. Write cross platform desktop apps in C. Presumably it would not have been very usable in practice in the late 1980s, because of all the OTHER system interfaces that still weren't portable, even if the windowing system was available in a portable way. I can remember the subsequent period in which Java desktop apps were relatively common. They had cross platform UI by default. But the problem was:…

1) cross platform GUIs are ugly by default, compared to fully native desktop apps, because they don't entirely replicate the affordances or the style of the platform;

These two things don't connect. Not being identical doesn't mean ugly or only one GUI would be considered not ugly.

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#53

Post by CyberDildonics »

red_admiral wrote: post #34

A portable GUI interface is a hard problem, unless you mean "a browser window without an URL bar" and your controls are HTML/CSS components. Windows has keyboard shortcuts on buttons, but you can set per-user whether they appear underlined always or only when you hold Alt. Mac always has exactly one, immovable menu bar; and Enter doesn't close a dialog box. GNOME can rollup or pin windows from the title bar if you ad…

A portable GUI interface is a hard problem, unless you mean "a browser window without an URL bar" and your controls are HTML/CSS components.

Says who? This has already been done over and over. Tk, FLTK, JUCE, Qt, ImGUI and many more.

Worse still, you're building an abstraction layer on top of several genuinely different systems,

Features are pretty common across linux windows and macos. Clipboards, input, files, all sorts of stuff works enough that the lowest common denominator still covers about 90% of use cases.

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#54

Post by hulitu »

cxr wrote: post #45
StilesCrisis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When OS X was new, Apple was still under the assumption that Java on the desktop was important, and they built an in-house Java with full Aqua support. It was still _terrible_! All the Aqua-specific affordances like animation or shadows were janky or absent. Sizing and positioning always felt weird because the application was written assuming Windows-shaped controls. Basically, cross-platform GUI only looks good on t…

> cross-platform GUI only looks good on the platform that it was originally designed for Formulated more rigorously, cross-platform GUIs and outsider, non-Mac-first GUIs ported to Mac OS look (and feel) bad on Mac. The opposite is virtually never true though; there aren't really high standards for beauty or consistency on the other platforms. Windows, for example, in this decade is a mishmash of different toolkits (e…

> The opposite is virtually never true though; there aren't really high standards for beauty or consistency on the other platforms

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don't find Apple UI beautiful and consistency is missing in some places at least on iOS.

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#55

Post by hulitu »

graemep wrote: post #15
flohofwoe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other popular option for cross-platform UI apps was Tcl/Tk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tk_(software) ...which even leaked into other language ecosystems like Python: https://docs.python.org/3/library/tkinter.html

Which had the ugliness problem then, although it is a lot better now.

Not all people love Material design. The fact, that the Label became the main UI widget, is an unfortunate accident.

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#56

Post by pantulis »

robotresearcher wrote: post #49
akreal wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also expected screenshots there, especially given the word "interface". Turns out, it's not about user interface (UI), it's about programming interface (kinda API). It allows calling window-related functions on Macintosh, X Window System, and Atari. So the resulting windows were looking like a native UI, I assume.

The readers' natural question is 'does this look reasonable on multiple platforms?'. A two-second glance at two or three screenshots goes a long way to answering that.

In hindsight, this sounds more reasonable in 2026 where graphical documentation is taken for granted. In those days I think anyone would have spooled the .ps to their nearest laser printer and begin building something quickly with it just to check the looks.

I remember following a "build your own text windowing system" tutorial printed in a hcontinous paper back then

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#57

Post by cxr »

hulitu wrote: post #54
cxr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cross-platform GUI only looks good on the platform that it was originally designed for Formulated more rigorously, cross-platform GUIs and outsider, non-Mac-first GUIs ported to Mac OS look (and feel) bad on Mac. The opposite is virtually never true though; there aren't really high standards for beauty or consistency on the other platforms. Windows, for example, in this decade is a mishmash of different toolkits (e…

> The opposite is virtually never true though; there aren't really high standards for beauty or consistency on the other platforms The beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don't find Apple UI beautiful and consistency is missing in some places at least on iOS.

And what are your thoughts on Frito chili pie?

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#58

Post by robotresearcher »

pantulis wrote: post #56
robotresearcher wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The readers' natural question is 'does this look reasonable on multiple platforms?'. A two-second glance at two or three screenshots goes a long way to answering that.

In hindsight, this sounds more reasonable in 2026 where graphical documentation is taken for granted. In those days I think anyone would have spooled the .ps to their nearest laser printer and begin building something quickly with it just to check the looks. I remember following a "build your own text windowing system" tutorial printed in a hcontinous paper back then

The document looks to be nicely rendered, likely from Postscript. Maybe generated by roff, since it doesn't look like TeX. Screen cap bitmaps could be converted to EPS and inserted into the Postscript.

If it was a PS document, you would have to spool it to a printer or screen renderer to read it anyway. The X Window System debuted in 1984, so on-screen renders would have been not too hard to find in a CS department in 1989.

Re: Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

#59

Post by StilesCrisis »

hulitu wrote: post #54
cxr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cross-platform GUI only looks good on the platform that it was originally designed for Formulated more rigorously, cross-platform GUIs and outsider, non-Mac-first GUIs ported to Mac OS look (and feel) bad on Mac. The opposite is virtually never true though; there aren't really high standards for beauty or consistency on the other platforms. Windows, for example, in this decade is a mishmash of different toolkits (e…

> The opposite is virtually never true though; there aren't really high standards for beauty or consistency on the other platforms The beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don't find Apple UI beautiful and consistency is missing in some places at least on iOS.

I don't think that's actually true. OS X really wants more whitespace between controls than other OSes do. If you just naively port an OS X dialog to Windows or Linux, it'll seem too spread-out.
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