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Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

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Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#501

Post by threatofrain »

barrkel wrote: post #161
eschaton wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If instead of insisting on custom UI styling the author just used the system UI, they could probably build a pretty straightforward Windows application. It’s the scourge of “brand identity” that has people thinking graphical applications are hard. Same on the Mac: If you want to build a Mac application, your best bet will be AppKit or SwiftUI and using system controls. And when the OS updates your application will ei…

This indeed. Custom UI widgets for Windows apps are really not necessary most of the time, and fitting in with the system theme is all you ought to aim for, most of the time. There are exceptions, for very rich dense UI, for UIs that need to be cross-platform, but if you're writing a Windows app, it should look and feel like a Windows app.

Or if you’re making games. All games seem to cherish a unique look even starting from the game menu or title screen.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#502

Post by zer0zzz »

Lariscus wrote: post #230

I have a very low opinion of developers who decry having to pay for a commercial licence for otherwise LGPL licensed software libraries. They expect to be paid for their work, and ensure that by creating closed source software. That's fair enough. Yet, the devs that solved the actually difficult parts of creating a UI library have to be utter saints who freely bestow a gift of code upon the world.

No, it makes perfect sense to complain about paid software libraries because it inevitably makes getting to them a huge pain in the ass and that causes folks who just want to easily give the library a try every reason to go try something else. Then as a result the ecosystem of apps using sad framework begins to stagnate.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#503

Post by kergonath »

pshirshov wrote: post #500

I had a similar struggle. I needed a truly cross-platform (Windows, Linux/Wayland, Mac, iOS, Android) GUI toolkit with rich controls library and reasonable theming. In fact, the only good option is QT and it's very hard to be productive with C++, it still lacks even basic features, like type deconstruction and ADTs/GADTs with exhaustiveness checks. QT bindings for other languages aren't mature enough. Apart from QT,…

Are there serious issues with wxwidgets? When I was looking for this sort of things it was unglamorous, but had decent bindings with several languages and looked decent enough. I agree with your assessment of the other alternatives.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#504

Post by pshirshov »

kergonath wrote: post #503
pshirshov wrote: post #500

I had a similar struggle. I needed a truly cross-platform (Windows, Linux/Wayland, Mac, iOS, Android) GUI toolkit with rich controls library and reasonable theming. In fact, the only good option is QT and it's very hard to be productive with C++, it still lacks even basic features, like type deconstruction and ADTs/GADTs with exhaustiveness checks. QT bindings for other languages aren't mature enough. Apart from QT,…

Are there serious issues with wxwidgets? When I was looking for this sort of things it was unglamorous, but had decent bindings with several languages and looked decent enough. I agree with your assessment of the other alternatives.

If I go with C++, I'll take QT, which has lot more extensive controls library and in fact allows me to be more productive than wxw.

Unfortunately, the main productivity limiter is C++ and that's something I really want to avoid. I've been writing C++ professionally for about 8 years so I think I can make such statements.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#506

Post by glzone1 »

pjmlp wrote: post #325
glzone1 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha.. That is too funny - I haven't been following this closely anymore. It's honestly wild. Does WPF still do data binding by reflection? I can usually "feel" a WPF app if I'm doing a lot of data work. I remember when WinForms (which I thought was fine!) was killed. Why they just didn't continue to build on that I don't know (yes, I've heard the explanations, the importance of things like having XML (barf) in the f…

Supposedly is being worked on for making it more Native AOT friendly. How we got into this mess? WinDev and DevDiv politcs. After the Longhorn debacle, its technologies landed on DevDiv, like WCF and WPF. Sinofsky and friends never were that keen in having .NET coming into their turf, it is no surprise that Hilo sample for Windows 7, then praises COM and C++ for Windows applications[0][1]. Then coming in this path, W…

This at least explains what from the outside looks like total insanity.

What's been confusing is they've been chasing all sorts of things (phones / tablets / web development) so clearly had money to burn, but couldn't deliver a basic solution for their own platform.

Clean simple line of business apps (ie, datagrid / listviews needs to work etc with bigger excel type datasets) + maybe RemoteApps or some other remoting option for SAAS type deployment would have been a nice option to have for plenty of folks.

For a lot of use cases the modern solutions are both worse to develop for AND are slower / buggier - so you get little for the effort

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#507

Post by davee »

MikeTV wrote: post #205
ack_complete wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most controls ask their parent what color they should be via a window message. There are a LARGE number of areas where this is not provided, such as the text color of a disabled control or the checkbox area of a checkbox control. Even for the cases where such customization points were provided, many of them were broken when theming was added in Windows XP and in comctl32.dll version 6 in Vista, which ignores some o…

Do you happen to have links to any good documentation/articles on this topic? I'm working on what amounts to a dark theme for Win32 controls and largely making it up as I go along, relying on tidbits and off-hand mentions from defunct blogs.

I have a reasonably complete implementation of dark mode in my open source application, Explorer++. It uses the standard Win32 controls and applies a variety of strategies to get something that looks more-or-less cohesive when dark mode is enabled. ThemeManager.cpp[0] contains the bulk of the functionality. It could be useful as a reference for how you might create a dark version of a standard Win32 control.

[0] https://github.com/derceg/explorerplusplus/blob/4bad3ab95d87...

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#508

Post by glzone1 »

pjmlp wrote: post #367
Const-me wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UWP was designed primarily for Windows phones, usability on desktops suffers. And it requires windows store, you can’t just ship an installer .exe WinUI seems to be copy-pasted from UWP, same usability issues on desktops. Unlike UWP, it’s a mess in terms of software quality. Also the runtime is huge, I think the size in MB even exceeds Electron. About MAUI, it seems Microsoft decided to make an abstraction over nativ…

MAUI is basically Xamarin.Forms, rebranded and rewritten, thus forcing the whole Xamarin community to rewrite their stuff, or go elsewhere. Miguel de Icaza is pretty sour on this, and quite likely one of the reasons he is now fully into Apple ecosystem and Swift. Blazor started with being only a WebAssembly based framework, then they decided to put everthing on ASP.NET under Blazor umbrella, and are now pushing Blazo…

Blazor is interesting. They are biting off an absolutely metric done of stuff. I will say their development style -> social media etc seems good which might help drive some buyin. They have public roadmaps. The outcomes still pretty rough ("Could not reconnect to the server") when falling off the happy path. So it still had a bit of that "in theory" development style that in terms of use annoys developers.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#509

Post by zigzag312 »

bux93 wrote: post #451
zigzag312 wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Custom styling should be considered a hostile pattern in most cases Why? Almost every website has custom styling and yet it doesn't seem to inhibit users from using them. Good UI/UX patterns seems to be universal. As consistency is part of good UI/UX there are things that should be consistent with the underlying platform. But consistency with the platform is not equally important for all things. For some things, li…

How would you know inconsistency among websites isn't inhibiting users from using them? There's not a Web A and Web B to do A/B testing on. Roundness of buttons? Buttons shouldn't be round in the first place. Back in the day, they were these rectangular things with a shadow and a highlight. You could instantly things you can and cannot click on. Now, it's anyone's guess. Do people click on the wrong stuff? Do people…

There's a lot of A/B testing going on on the web.

> Buttons shouldn't be round in the first place.

Is there any data available to back this up?

Modern UIs are not perfect by any means, but from what I remember, those old UIs were not great either... even worse in terms of UX on average.

While consistency is important, placing it above all else, leads to suboptimal UX and bland UIs. How many times did you hear people raving about how great is the UI of an app build with a generic form builder?

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#510

Post by brnt »

alkonaut wrote: post #360
throwaway2037 wrote: post #293

Reading many of these comments makes me realise that the whole premise is flawed. I "vote" to rename this blog post as: > Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful when requirements are unrealistic They should try to target .NET Framework 3.5 using WinForms. That is my best suggestion, as all recent versions of Windows will have this installed (at least).

No go for net 4.6 which is installed on every currently supported Windows version back to the original Win10 released almost a decade ago. There are still people running Win 7 but I wouldn't worry about that group having a streamlined experience. With 4.6 they can still install the runtime manually.

Why 4.6 and not 4.8? (I assume you mean .Net Framework and not .Net.)
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