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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

#571

Post by gt0 »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #276
gt0 wrote: post #257

When a platform can’t answer “how should I build a UI?” in under ten seconds, it has failed its developers. Full stop. That's fine, except no platform answers this. Obviously Linux doesn't, but the Mac doesn't either. Apple of course has it's recommendation, but most developers do not take Apple's recommended path because of course, it's Apple-only, most developers make cross-platform apps these days. Even if Microso…

I think the mac mostly does this. Developers not caring about the answer is a different thing. But I gather from your comment that you don't actually care to ask that question, since you have a different need, and already have a solution which works for you. Which I guess is fine if you're happy with the compromise. But this is about people who actually still care to have "native" applications.

Agree, and this is my point. Apple absolutely has a very clear message on how developers should make software, but as you say, developers often do not care.

I am a desktop app "believer" I like desktop apps, I like native desktop apps, but I also have to make software that makes economic sense, and following Apple's guidelines just doesn't make any sense for me, and a lot of other companies too.

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

#572

Post by lunar_rover »

antiframe wrote: post #568
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is, both Firefox and Chrome look out of place on it when you use a non-standard color scheme. Custom keyboard shortcuts won't work on Chrome. When you change a theme from light to dark and vice versa, both browsers like to have text in their UI stuck on the wrong color. I could use Konqueror, I guess, but its ad blocking plugin (and plugins overall) seems to never have progressed much since KDE 2.

Right, applications can break all sorts of UI consistency. But the question is: do the standard components that the vendor ships do it? I argue: KDE is consistent. I don't want my desktop UI to dictate how an app draws its UI (or games would be impossible).

> But the question is: do the standard components that the vendor ships do it? I argue: KDE is consistent.

Well yes, I do agree with this. Internally it's mostly consistent, at least more so than Windows. Never analysed its UI structures though.

> I don't want my desktop UI to dictate how an app draws its UI (or games would be impossible).

As a platform, ensuring applications running on top of it stay consistent to varying degree is the job of the desktop/OS IMO. To what degree depends on the context, https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/#con... is a great read.

Even games need it, missing input field features has plagued PC games for decades and can be crippling for input method users, Skyrim's console needs mods to support copy and paste. Custom mouse acceleration curves is the reason everyone disabled it, zero acceleration is the easiest way to make different games handle mouse input consistently.

A shame Linux isn't standardised enough.

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

#573

Post by drysart »

> I sat through a conference session in the late nineties trying to understand the difference between an OLE document, a COM object, and an ActiveX control.

To be brutally honest, if you were a serious Windows developer in those days (and you were even the sort who'd have sat through a conference session on the topic); there is absolutely no way in hell you'd not understand the difference between OLE, COM, and ActiveX. Conflating these things as some sort of confusing mess either shows a lack of actual experience, a lack of competency, or a desire to falsely make things seem more confusing than they were to add some meat to an article.

This article dances with some good points, but opening up with this sort of hyperbole (and then ending it with an unabashed AI slop image filled with brand new hallucinated characters of the alphabet) just totally tanks the author's reputation.

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

#574

Post by geon »

SarahC_ wrote: post #464
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.

Isn't that windows only?

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

#575

Post by iamcalledrob »

xoac wrote: post #534
iamcalledrob wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/Adwai…

For all the grief they are getting GTK4/Adwaita/Gnome is doing a lot for performance and consistency of experience.

My GNOME desktop is more coherent than my Mac one at this point

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

#576

Post by TeMPOraL »

radiator wrote: post #558
vovavili wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> - Qt Widgets worked fine, but looked like a piece of software made in 2013; That's too bad, because I prefer software which looks like it was made in 1999.

Ah, the magic times when screen resolutions were large enough to display lots of information, in proper 4:3 aspect ratio, just before they got flattened and the industry started treating them as short view distance TVs.

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

#577

Post by u8080 »

vscode-rest wrote: post #522
u8080 wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Telegram Desktop is opensource and they also have full-functional Web version. But tdesktop is really well-made Qt piece of software, snappy, feature-rich and multi-platform.

Interesting, at first pass I’d say the source availability has little to do with the topic at hand. But on second thought it might be rather significant. No company would finance making 2x identical cross platform apps, but if you have a pool of OS folks who are free to contribute at their leisure, the calculus changes a bit.

But isn't the whole point of linked article is that author doesn't like regular apps because it lacks control over UI and functionality compared to Web apps?

Being open-source is kinda even better in that regard.

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

#578

Post by Doxin »

12_throw_away wrote: post #547
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…

> basic rules that had been in place for ages. Things like: [...] I am going to add my favorite here, just to rant into the void. A dialog box's options must never be Ok/Cancel. These are not the same sorts of things. "Cancel" is a verb, "Ok" is a noun (in this context). Even if "Ok" is taken to mean the verb "acknowledge", it is still not an alternative to cancelling. 99% of these dialogs should be "[Verb]/Cancel":…

IMO the ubiquitous Yes/No/Cancel is even worse. No and Cancel are too conceptually close. Doesn't help that these usually show up when you're about to lose all your unsaved changes.

We've got big screens now! use more words! Save changes/Discard changes/Don't quit.

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

#579

Post by severak_cz »

gt0 wrote: post #257

When a platform can’t answer “how should I build a UI?” in under ten seconds, it has failed its developers. Full stop. That's fine, except no platform answers this. Obviously Linux doesn't, but the Mac doesn't either. Apple of course has it's recommendation, but most developers do not take Apple's recommended path because of course, it's Apple-only, most developers make cross-platform apps these days. Even if Microso…

Delphi (or Free Pascal+Lazarus) and Visual Basic had this capability (to easily spin up GUI). It was called RAD.

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

#580

Post by Birkoff »

I've worked inside the Microsoft 365/SharePoint ecosystem for over 20 years, and the incoherence runs deeper than the GUI layer.

Microsoft has been developer first, then cloud first, now AI first. It has never been design first. And when something does work, the pattern is always the same: force it everywhere. Metro was genuinely good on mobile, then they pushed it onto desktop where it didn't fit. Now Fluent UI is repeating the cycle.

Fluent UI is on its third major rewrite (Fabric, then Fluent UI React v8, then v9). Each one brought breaking changes. v9 appeared around the same time Microsoft released their new Teams client, and it shipped with performance and accessibility issues that are still being worked through. Signs already point to the next throwaway Fluent UI version. In practice, Fluent seems to be first-party only. It's 'open source' in the sense that you can look but don't touch. In SharePoint alone, the same UI elements look different across pages, lists, document libraries, and settings panels.

The irony is that the web platform itself has caught up. You can build a fully themed, accessible component library in plain HTML and CSS today. No framework dependency, no version lock-in. I did exactly that with hTWOo (https://htwoo.io/), an open-source alternative that matches the Fluent design language without any of the React coupling.

The real problem isn't that Microsoft can't pick a GUI strategy. It's that they keep rebuilding from scratch instead of creating a design system flexible enough to sustain across platforms and product generations. The web platform already provides the primitives. You just have to commit to them.

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