[HN Gopher] Windows 11: a survey of text boxes
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Windows 11: a survey of text boxes
Author : sjmulder
Score : 106 points
Date : 2021-09-03 11:58 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sjmulder.nl)
(TXT) w3m dump (sjmulder.nl)
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Even font rendering is inconsistent: notice how Win32 widgets use
| subpixel antialiasing but the modern ones don't.
| anthk wrote:
| Dear Microsoft: Just clone Zukitre giving consistency and a
| neutral gray-ish scheme to everything.
|
| I am not an artist but media producers love the neutral gray and
| so does everyone else. Light themes are too bright.
| 65 wrote:
| Tell that to news sites. I wish more news sites used containers
| around their content and had grey backgrounds.
|
| ESPN and NPR are two examples of news sites that use containers
| with grey backgrounds and I think they're both really nice to
| read. Not some blinding amount of pure white like most news
| sites.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| We live in the world of web apps and electron now, UI consistency
| is dead and buried because they killed it. Windows's UI mess is
| just a reflection of them hiring modern developers.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >Windows's UI mess is just a reflection of them hiring modern
| developers
|
| While I agree UI consistency is dead even on MacOS now,
| personally I believe the Windows issue stems from them being
| too scared to actually push out full redesigns.
|
| Look how vocal and angry people were when they started
| redesigning Settings even though most of control panel was
| designed for sub 800x600 resolutions.
|
| This is why we're stuck with such inconsistency because they
| can never make sweeping changes without people freaking out,
| this is why we're stuck with things like that terrible device
| manager that refreshes the whole view and flickers 3 times when
| you plug in a USB device.
|
| Really Windows should be pushing out a complete redesign and
| update of at least 2 of these apps every version. People will
| scream and shout every time they do but it's the only chance
| Windows has to completely modernize itself and get it up to par
| with Mac system tools and standard apps.
| rocqua wrote:
| What surprises me is how little functionality the new
| settings app has, and how often to get things done, I need to
| click through to an older settings screen.
|
| Its not that they modernized the old settings / configuration
| screen. They made a new one that does about 1/3 of the job
| and still links to the old one for the last 2/3. It does not
| seem like Microsoft intend to slowly have the new settings
| setup subsume the old settings. Nor do they seem to want to
| improve the old settings. Instead we are left with a weird
| stack of settings screens.
| vidanay wrote:
| This is largely because "modern" design has such poor
| information density, it requires 15 different screens for a
| single screen of a "legacy" UI.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| They've made it pretty clear that to prioritize they've
| been following the 80/20 rule as best they can with the
| data they have. They try to prioritize the things people do
| most often in each iteration because they don't have the
| budget to do 100% of the things all at once. (And it
| probably is a waste of time to upgrade settings features
| that 0% of people use.)
|
| The big real complication is that data they have available
| on what is used 80/90% of the time is _telemetry_. It 's
| not a coincidence that the people that find that the
| settings they use the most that haven't been converted are
| in the set of people most complaining about telemetry and
| most actively disabling it.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| As sibling mentions, the problem isn't that they made a new
| settings panel, it's that the new settings panel is both
| slower and less functional than the old ones!
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| When you refuse to hire junior developers for $50-60k and
| every new hire has to be a $200k rockstar, the rockstars
| have to provide value. They have to have something to show.
| So they have to rearrange something, replace something, do
| something.
|
| This isn't unique to Windows. It's a general problem. When
| something like network configuration or screen resolution
| had been a pretty stagnant thing for 20 years, you could
| just leave it alone or... spruce it up. Sure, it's always
| possible that there are better ideas. But implementing a
| change because you have a better idea is one thing.
| Implementing a change to justify your salary is another
| thing.
| blackhaz wrote:
| Apple has killed UI consistency too. New iOS and tvOS are just
| a mess of endless half-broken features in a pathetic attempt to
| satisfy every possible use case out there. Jobs would have used
| napalm on the whole UI/UX team.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Maybe. Jobs also introduced some rather outrageous UI (IMHO)
| when he returned to Apple.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| I think a difference with Jobs at the helm though was yes,
| he let some really terrible UI's get into production, but
| he also had no problem axing them when he finally accepted
| they were awful.
|
| The problem we're seeing now is nobody is willing to
| rollback bad ideas.
| cies wrote:
| The UI consistency of most Linux distros is better out of the
| box.
|
| 2021 the year of the Linux desktop? /s
| marcodiego wrote:
| Consistency is not something windows users expect. In the
| "windows world" most software is downloaded from different
| sources, different vendors, different styles and each tries
| to stand out.
|
| The result: every program is different in appearance and
| behaviour.
| cies wrote:
| I did not use it much after W98SE. W98SE was very
| consistent imho.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Office 97 had a different style. Most commonly used
| programs had different sytles: winamp had its own UI, IE
| had it own theme, winfile had different icons...
|
| Yes, system and default apps were somewhat consistent.
| But out of the box, a win9x installation was very poor
| with regard to installed software; you had to install
| more things if you wanted you computer to be useful. And
| the consistency went away.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Ironically Linux's relative consistency is in part due to the
| long standing complaint about how inconsistent it was, which
| motivated developers to create ways to have unified theming
| across toolkits.
|
| Meanwhile, the rest of the world went full derp and decided
| that UI consistency is for boring people who like to actually
| get things done with a computer.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| To add to the irony too, because Linux was so inconsistent
| for so long more of the GUI toolkits also had to adapt
| better to fluctuating layouts and had fewer reasons to
| hard-code specific pixel sizes for controls (because one
| person's theme might use hugely different sizes than the
| next person).
|
| Microsoft found out the hard way with Windows XP that Win32
| controls generally can't be rethemed in ways that change
| the pixel counts because they were consistent for so long
| that apps did all sorts of (sometimes very dumb) pixel-
| specific logic. Microsoft's commitment to backwards
| compatibility makes any consistency in theming Win32
| controls near impossible without application developer buy-
| in, and buy in of XAML and actually adaptive layouts has
| still been extremely slow overall even if you can discount
| how long pixel-perfect RAD tools with zero adaptive layout
| support dominated early Windows development (including and
| especially VB <= 6).
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| That is true. I pine for the Macintosh Toolbox days when there
| was a simple and consistent UI ... essentially dictated by
| having a modest set of UI elements and a single framework for
| displaying them.
|
| But I remind myself that in 1984, the idea of a visual
| interface was a little shocking to people: "What do I do? Where
| can I click?"
|
| The Web kicked open the door and allowed all manner of UI
| designs. At the same time though, people were more comfortable
| navigating the breadth of UI by then.
|
| I still prefer simplicity, consistency though.
| userbinator wrote:
| _" What do I do? Where can I click?"_
|
| ...and now several decades later, I find myself asking the
| same question whenever I have to interact with a "modern" UI.
| Is it really that hard to make buttons look like actual
| buttons, and static text _not_ look like buttons!?
| imbnwa wrote:
| Windows UI has been utterly inconsistent since Windows 8.
|
| 'Modern develpoers'? What're you talking about, first of all,
| HN has weird trend of speaking as if Devs are these all-
| powerful artisans at their org when actually there's a Product
| Manager and a whole design org that makes these calls, Devs at
| best can file a recommendation and maybe get it considered.
|
| Secondly, Electron is a business choice to minimize time spent
| doing cross-platfom GUI development. Can someone give me the
| list of cross-platform apps from back in the day with well
| thought out platform-specific GUIs? Cause I swear most of the
| popular Windows apps I used in the early 2000s like Winamp,
| Foobar2000, Notepad++, Soulseek, uTorrent, were Windows-only.
| Everyone's not just gonna run out and learn Qt, so tired of
| this low-hanging fruit type comment about Electron/Web
| Developers ruining everything. Go talk to this thing called
| _the market_ instead.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| The hyper consistent UI guidelines of the 80s and 90s were born
| in an era when we had to convince grown human beings to use these
| brand new (to them) systems without feeling too embarrassed about
| being awful at it.
|
| Today, and perhaps for decades to come, by the time someone
| touches a PC, they've been screwing around on phones and tablets.
| They live their lives on the internet and apps, where "standard
| looking" often implies "cheap and knock-off", and long term
| consistency often implies "stale and old". They already know that
| nothing is consistent, and things aren't always what they seem.
|
| Today the point on significantly diminishing returns on spending
| resources on UI consistency is lower than ever. It's fun to pick
| on the textboxes, but it doesn't matter. It won't stop anyone
| from being productive and happy using the software.
| sjmulder wrote:
| > Today the point on significantly diminishing returns on
| spending resources on UI consistency is lower than ever.
|
| You'd think having one blessed toolkit and implementing things
| there, once, takes much fewer resources than doing it half-
| heartedly over and over again.
| ho_schi wrote:
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/signatu...
|
| Didn't worked well?
|
| The UI on Windows is problematic since Windows XP. Microsoft
| doesn't maintain actually the libraries for the UI, they just add
| new libraries. And developers learned that on Windows you can do
| whatever you want.
|
| * Win32 (C, requires experience but reliable?)
|
| * Microsoft Foundation Classes (C++, Win32)
|
| * WTL (C++, Win32)
|
| * Windows Forms (.net)
|
| * Windows Presentation Foundation (.net)
|
| * WinUI (C#, C++)
|
| Please tell me if you forgot a UI library provided by Microsoft?
|
| Gtk tries to make Gtk2, Gtk3 and Gtk4 look somewhat same and
| integrated applications of GNOME feel rather same. Similar for Qt
| and KDE and for Apple. Honestly, Firefox and LibreOffice doesn't
| fit perfectly. This is also the reason for Epiphany, which is
| using Gtk natively. https://developer.gnome.org/hig/
|
| https://develop.kde.org/hig/
|
| https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
|
| I miss a HIG for TUI (*curses). The behavior of CLI applications
| is partially defined by GNU (-l, --long, -L) but of rourse
| requires reading the manual:
| https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Command_002dLin...
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| Firefox has improved a lot in recent versions in regards to
| following the system theme on Linux. LibreOffice is still meh.
| I have a friend who uses Manjaro and a lot of buttons in LO are
| basically invisible with the default theme.
| marcodiego wrote:
| It is a shame that GNOME has no manpower to quickly update all
| of its apps whenever HIG changes. Nevertheless, consistency in
| GNOME apps has been much better than default windowls for a
| long time.
| jcelerier wrote:
| paging for the next time someone complains about cross-platform
| solutions not following the OS design guidelines exactly
| dleslie wrote:
| Windows hasn't had a consistent look and feel since Windows 95;
| even Win95 OSR2 brought some Active Desktop widgets and browser
| integration into explorer, which broke the uniformity of the UI.
| kwanbix wrote:
| Windows 2000 was pretty consistent.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| DOS was boss for consistency.
| timw4mail wrote:
| In what way? Every single program had to make its own
| interface. Even in text mode, there are tons of hacks to
| make interfaces look different, and not much has changed
| with more modern CLI programs.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Not true. CUA-compliant software was somewhat consistent,
| but they were rare. Many simply implemented a half assed
| toolkit each with a different behaviour and appearance
| polyterative wrote:
| My designer eye makes me really feel bad by looking at these all
| close together
| queuebert wrote:
| Be honest: Do any of the Windows components in isolation make
| you feel good either?
| albertopv wrote:
| And they say linux desktop environments UI is inconsistent...
| quyleanh wrote:
| Is it hard to make all these elements consistent?
| Darmody wrote:
| They are not going to lose users because of this, so why
| bother?
| solarkraft wrote:
| It's a part of why they lost me.
| Darmody wrote:
| I should've said they won't lose a a meaningful share of
| users.
|
| Most people don't care. They probably don't even notice
| because they only use third party software on top of
| Windows.
| datenarsch wrote:
| It's not true that most people don't care. Most people
| absolutely hate it that they have to re-learn Word or
| Excel or Windows whenever a new version comes out. Just
| ask any mom or dad. But what can they do about it,
| really? Nothing.
| ziml77 wrote:
| This is certainly why. There's not much value in making them
| consistent. Hell, I notice these things but don't really
| think or care much about them. It just doesn't affect my
| interactions. They all still look like places to enter text,
| which is the important part of their design.
| hexa22 wrote:
| Tbh some of these even look better in context. I'm not sure
| why it even matters that every text box is pixel perfect
| identical rather than suitable for the environment.
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| Windows does have a large visual surface, but so does OS X, and
| Apple mostly manages to have a consistent UI. I wonder if
| that's because Microsoft has introduced so many different UI
| frameworks over the years.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Try to run Carbon, Cocoa, Catalyst and SwiftUI applications
| across similar workflows and you will find similar issues.
|
| Last week's ATP podcast had a long rant about it.
| codebolt wrote:
| And most of them are now deprecated. In fact, on .NET 5,
| there is no good desktop UI framework at all. It seems to me
| that if you wrote a Windows Desktop app in the last 30 years,
| the only way it would still be supported today (i.e. possible
| to maintain using non-deprecated frameworks) is if it was
| based directly on the old Win32 API (or the MFC wrapper).
| dleslie wrote:
| This is mostly correct, I think. Just imagine all those
| SilverLight apps that are languishing.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Someday: https://github.com/dotnet/maui
| sjmulder wrote:
| > if you wrote a Windows Desktop app in the last 30 years,
| the only way it would still be supported today ... is if it
| was based directly on the old Win32 API
|
| I thought the same and did just that to see if it holds
| true: https://github.com/sjmulder/netwake
|
| By default you get Windows 95 styling and Windows 3 fonts.
| You have to opt into 'visual styles' (introduced in XP)
| with a declaration in the app manifest and have to manually
| query and use the system font. DPI awareness is also opt in
| and puts all the work (sizing/positioning,
| scaling/reloading fonts) on you. But when you do that, it
| does look fine on Windows 10.
|
| Not so much on Windows 11. Some of the widgets have been
| updated to mimic the new style but when you put it together
| it looks messy and old fashioned (e.g. fonts + you don't
| get the new context menus).
|
| I'm curious to learn how one would create a 'proper'
| Windows app without having to reimplement the system's
| widget styling.
| jcelerier wrote:
| That shit makes me so happy to use Qt
| WorldMaker wrote:
| .NET 5 saw renewed development in WPF, including some
| useful improvements over WPF in .NET 4.x. They've given the
| impression that WPF is fully "undeprecated" and current
| documentation points to WPF as the best way to utilize
| WinUI 3.0 controls (modern Windows controls) in .NET today.
|
| (WinForms also saw a bunch of reinvestment in .NET 5 and
| also has a road to migrate to WinUI 3.0 controls if you
| really want, but I would argue that WinForms was never a
| "good desktop UI framework".)
| whalesalad wrote:
| Based on the last hundred years of Windows releases -
| apparently the answer is yes.
| userbinator wrote:
| _Windows Terminal colour dialog_
|
| My response upon seeing that was "WTF! That looks ridiculously
| amateurish!" It almost feels like it's trolling me. Even the
| labels somehow manage to have a different size of font than the
| rest of the dialog, something a noob in the 90s using Visual
| Basic drag-and-drop to create dialogs would not produce without
| expending (considerable) additional effort.
|
| Ironically, Win32 has had a much more full-featured and standard
| dialog for choosing colours since Windows 3.x:
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dlgbox/color-...
| the_only_law wrote:
| Wow I'd at least hope for a preview of the color I'm
| "choosing".
| ziml77 wrote:
| In Windows Terminal? You do get that.
| https://i.imgur.com/nSJlAy0.png
|
| Personally, I like this better simply because it has the RGB
| representation in hex which is so much easier to copy and
| paste than dealing with 3 individual textboxes.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Ah ok, I admittedly haven't used Windows terminal much as
| of yet, I thought the screenshot shown in the article was
| majority of the dialog.
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| I don't understand why microsoft doesn't have a small team
| dedicated to look and feel and just bringing it all up to date -
| all those control panel applets, have they finally been upgraded?
| pjmlp wrote:
| No, not really.
|
| You get some updated Win32 window classes, theme engine updated
| for the UWP based stuff (or WinUI if on desktop side) and
| that's it.
| AmVess wrote:
| I have no idea why they don't sort this out. Perhaps they feel
| like it is an issue. Windows 11 has UI elements from every OS
| back to Windows 3.1. I guess they like the absurdity of
| stacking various settings behind 2-3 control panels, some of
| which aren't even linked from one panel to the other.
| coldacid wrote:
| Costs versus benefits.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Instead they have a bunch of small teams dedicated to their own
| little siloed feature set and then they cobble it all together,
| that's my two second analysis of the inconsistencies seen here.
| userbinator wrote:
| _all those control panel applets, have they finally been
| upgraded_
|
| I hope not --- frankly speaking, this new stuff is horrible.
|
| Compare how long the original Control Panel takes to open with
| the new "Settings App". Then compare their visual complexity.
| The latter takes multiple seconds to open, even has a _loading
| screen_ , and yet all the controls in it are incredibly bland
| and featureless and conceptually simpler to render than in the
| old one. This is none other than a huge regression.
| nightcracker wrote:
| 80% of the time if I want to change something in the Windows
| 10 settings all my time is spent trying to find out which
| magic words I need to recite and which buttons I need to
| click to get to the old Windows 7 / XP style configuration
| dialogs.
|
| E.g. you have to navigate through this garbage:
| https://i.imgur.com/W1txUAK.png to find the one link (named
| "Sound Control Panel", hidden somewhere down the page) that
| opens the actual useful config panel:
| https://i.imgur.com/zDnnMPE.png
| garaetjjte wrote:
| I wish they would just improve the old interface. It is
| mostly fine, but suffers from claustrophobic fixed size
| windows and listboxes that needed to fit on 640x480
| screens. They also should make MMC toolkit DPI-aware.
| timw4mail wrote:
| That's how this mess started, trying to re-implement the
| settings screens in a more "modern" design.
|
| If they just made the original control panels work with
| HiDPI screens, there would be complaints that they've
| done nothing.
| hyakosm wrote:
| The best control panel was the Windows 95 version : only a
| grid of icons.
| matja wrote:
| And even that comes from Windows 3.0
| chaos_a wrote:
| > even has a loading screen
|
| Slightly unrelated, but this is one of this things that
| annoys me the most about using gmail. Inbox by Gmail used to
| load instantly, there's really no good reason at all for it
| to have a loading screen.
| FirstLvR wrote:
| they do have, the problem they have never use windows 11
| [deleted]
| drcongo wrote:
| As someone who hasn't had to use Windows since XP, is anyone able
| to explain the technicals of how this even happens? I mean, at a
| complete OS layman's level, one would assume that someone
| somewhere comes up with the design for how a text input should
| look across the OS, someone else probably writes the UI code for
| that, someone else maybe writes the plumbing for it, then
| _everyone_ uses it whenever they need a text input. What is it
| about Windows that means this is impossible? Their UIs are like
| the jumble sale aisle down the middle of Lidl.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Easy, they need to make sure Win32, MFC, Windows Forms, WPF,
| UWP and WinUI (basically UWP on Win32 without going into
| details) underlying rendering infrastructure gets aligned with
| the OS design language.
|
| Guess what, I am 100% sure they do the basic for Win32, make
| some efforts for WinUI 2.0 (UWP) and WinUI 3.0 (the Win32 one)
| and that's it.
| drcongo wrote:
| I get why they'd need to support all that for 3rd party app
| backwards compatibility, but surely for their own OS they can
| just use the current toolkit for everything? They own it
| after all.
| pjmlp wrote:
| What is the current toolkit?
|
| Win32 is quite basic in the set of controls available,
| almost everything in traditional Win32 applications is
| custom drawn, beyond what you also find the HTML forms as
| components.
|
| Then there are all commercial components that are so common
| in Windows applications.
|
| However if you will, the future is WinUI/UWP, and that is
| the only one getting full Mica support.
| sjmulder wrote:
| > Guess what, I am 100% sure they do the basic for Win32
|
| The Win32 widgets have been updated but apparently they don't
| want to mess with the metrics, hence those controls are much
| more compact, don't use rounded corners, etc.
|
| Is there any public UI toolkit in Windows now that offers the
| canonical widgets?
| ktpsns wrote:
| Probably third party toolkits such as wxwidgets or Java AWT
| (the Swing predecessor)?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Kind of, only for WinUI 2.6, the UWP version.
|
| The WinUI 3.0 (which is UWP decoupled from OS + UI) is
| still catching up.
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/apps/winui/winui2/r...
|
| Thing is, for Win32 anyone using bare bones Win32 has to do
| the work themselves for anything that ins't on the OS
| anyway.
|
| So MFC and Forms get a partiall update via those Win32
| changes, while WPF gets nothing due to its own DX rendering
| stack.
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/get-
| started/ma...
| sjmulder wrote:
| Looks like WinUI 2.6 is the way to go then. But I'm
| surprised that there doesn't appear to be any sort of
| official built in canonical thing with standard widgets
| (like what Win32 used to be). All these separate
| frameworks are implementing everything for themselves.
| ectopod wrote:
| WPF is nuts. It appeared to have native controls but in
| reality they reimplemented everything, with a unique
| style definition for every control on every supported
| version of Windows. It would have been a huge amount of
| work. It seems like they haven't bothered to keep up with
| it as control styles have evolved though.
| pjmlp wrote:
| If you check the github issues and community talks on
| YouTube, it is quite clear that when Microsoft went full
| steam with WinRT, most likely the remaining UI teams got
| ramped down.
|
| As they pivoted back into Reunion and merging Win32 and
| UWP worlds, new teams were created, so....
| pjmlp wrote:
| That train departed long ago.
|
| In fact already during the Win16 days, many of us were
| already jumping into C++, Delphi and VB frameworks,
| instead of suffering through plain C programming.
|
| Borland common controls used to be quite easy to spot
| with their green check mark.
|
| Win32 has very few built-in controls, and Windows always
| enjoyed a good ecosystem from commercial vendors selling
| custom controls, like Telerik and ComponentOne to refer
| to two well known ones.
|
| As historical info, modern COM traces back to Visual
| Basic VBX components.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_Extension
| sjmulder wrote:
| I think the core problem is that they all use different
| toolkits. The design teams come up with these great widget
| designs and then they all have to be implemented on a per-
| toolkit or even per-app basis.
|
| Just looking at Explorer:
|
| - The window itself is a regular Win32 window
|
| - It hosts a WinUI island or such for the top toolbar
|
| - The navigation bar is a ReBar with all custom Win32 widgets
|
| - The content view is a DirectUI widget
|
| You'd think that if they'd standardise on a single toolkit
| (like macOS with Cocoa) they'd be able to get better results
| with much less work. Perhaps this is an organisational issue?
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Really wish they'd just completely rewrite Explorer from the
| ground up.
|
| It's woefully antiquated feeling next to Finder. Seeing it
| struggle to scroll folders with 10,000+ items it can't even
| load them all in at once you have to scroll bit by bit,
| seeing it choke reading MP3 file folders because it's trying
| to do some dumb WinXP era metadata reading on an ancient code
| path. Seeing it unable to search for files on a sensible
| timescale or even accurately.
|
| It's infuriating.
| jcelerier wrote:
| at some point you could use KDE's Dolphin on windows, that
| was awesome
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| > Really wish they'd just completely rewrite Explorer from
| the ground up.
|
| Oh god no. They'd nuke all the keyboard shortcuts, make
| everything take 20x more space, remove any advanced
| features such as keying by non-primary column, sorting by
| weird file-specific metadata, etc, add loading screens
| everywhere, make even the most basic operations require an
| async dispatch to a runtime host, break credentials
| authentication with the OS keystore, remove IME and input
| accelerators, nuke integrations with 3rd party apps for
| menus, overlays, and previews, hide file extensions, run
| always in fullscreen, break ClearType text rendering, block
| access to any system files, break the elevated operations
| workflow, remove access to non-local files, use 20x as much
| memory, crash at startup, break when an update ships out-
| of-band on an older patch release, and then be rewritten in
| four years.
| oblio wrote:
| MacOS breaks compatibility regularly.
|
| If Windows would change the Win32/Winforms spacing and such I
| wouldn't want to be the developer that gets to keep all the
| pieces broken off.
|
| Read some Windows Terminal blog entries, they're very
| enlightening. They're basically working around a huge
| minefield of compatibility and trying to get things moving
| again. It's quite a feat of real software engineering, what
| they're doing over there.
| hughrr wrote:
| Yeah that's easy. Rather than fix the last thing it's easier to
| write a new turd from the ground up with the promise that it'll
| solve all the last problems.
|
| Windows happens to have such legacy support and lack of product
| direction that's it's now layers and layers or turds.
| AuthorizedCust wrote:
| Many generations of code and UX standards, all still supported.
|
| This just reveals Microsoft's prioritization of UX consistency.
| Whatever the priority is, it's not enough to overcome the
| perceived cost of creating consistency.
|
| It also shows why Windows can be a strength: still runs almost
| everything anyone ever made for it.
| ceronman wrote:
| I understand that Microsoft cares a lot about backwards
| compatibility. I think this is great and they should keep
| doing it.
|
| Now, I completely understand if some third-party program
| developed twenty years ago looks inconsistently. I even
| understand if some recent third party tool also looks
| inconsistently. But here we're talking about the software
| that is shipped with Windows and it's created by Microsoft
| directly. These are examples from Edge, Explorer, Settings,
| etc. This is more than having a low priority for consistency,
| this is Microsoft not even considering the possibility of
| consistency.
|
| I have not tried Windows 11. But I'm baffled to find that in
| Windows 10, Microsoft still ships parts of its own UI that
| are not high-dpi ready. They seem to have zero problem
| showing dialogs with scaled pixelated text.
| marcthe12 wrote:
| Some of these stuff expose plugin apis or hooks which make
| this complicated. Control panel is a good example of this.
| The only alternative is to effective create a new and make
| that default unless configured otherwise.
| spicybright wrote:
| The fact I can open most exe files from 1993 today on my
| window 10 laptop and have it work nearly perfect is an
| incredible feat.
|
| MacOS couldn't be more opposite in this regard. Linux I also
| dislike for this reason.
|
| It's expect you compile your own programs, but more often
| than not it'll fail if the project is abandoned for 5 years
| (purely anecdotal).
| petepete wrote:
| If I want to run an old program I'd rather do it in a VM
| and have a nice, lean, consistent, sensible OS.
| theranger wrote:
| Tell that to a bookeeper who runs aincent software the
| company has licensed decade ago or to the factory worker
| who must use a CAD software for a particular CNC machine
| to prepare the work files.
| petepete wrote:
| So yeah, legit but niche use case. Thankfully I don't
| need to worry about it so don't give it a second thought.
| jcelerier wrote:
| windows's long tail _is_ niche use cases
| [deleted]
| oblio wrote:
| You're a technical person. Grandpa would go: "VM? What's
| that???".
| datenarsch wrote:
| While I agree this is great, it is not really related to
| and no excuse for the inconsistent mess that Windows' UI
| has been ever since the Windows 8 Metro disaster. Win32 UI
| (think Windows 2000) was perfectly line.
| C19is20 wrote:
| ...at least you know where to find the jumble in lidl. And,
| despite being occasinaly messy, they're often preferabke to
| shop than to work out wtf is going on in UI land.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Initially, that was more or less how it worked. The older and
| closer to Win32 you are, the less customisable the look is.
|
| But more modern toolkits like WPF are much closer to html in
| their function. A text box is a white rectangle with a cursor.
| If you want to add autocomplete, placeholders, a magnifying
| glass icon in the edge - you _put it there yourself_.
|
| So basically, making a text search field in Windows now is the
| same as making it for a webpage. The toolkit doesn't have
| options for adding autocomplete, placeholder text or icons. I
| think this is the correct API design, because controls that
| could do everything would be very difficult to work with.
|
| That said, there should have been some utility or standard
| library to make it easier to be consistent, such as creating a
| "system-standard search box" which would then simply do all the
| gluing that is required for adding the necessary bells and
| whistles.
|
| I'm sure there is both documentation and utilitiies for doing
| exactly this - but the problem is that it's so hard to find
| because everything keeps moving. Ironically I think internal ms
| devs feel the same way.
| corty wrote:
| Windows UI has always been a shambles. Each version of Windows,
| Office and VisualSomething has at least one new toolkit. It
| might even look the same as the other ones that came before it,
| but internally is a different library with different
| incompatible APIs, bitmaps, workings, etc. Third-Party tools
| usually also provide their own toolkits that are sometimes made
| to look Windowsy, sometimes not.
|
| In some cases, APIs wouldn't be too much of a hindrance, and
| one could replace one toolkit by a later version with updated
| designs. But the designs themselves also do have a lot of
| compatibility problems: It is uncommon in the Windows GUI world
| to use layout managers (similar to CSS flexboxes and the like)
| that automatically adapt to different window and UI element
| sizes. Instead, most widgets are positioned pixel-wise. That is
| also why most dialogs are non-resizeable and things break e.g.
| when translated strings have different lengths. So a new design
| which changes sizes breaks all the pixelwise layouts
| everywhere.
|
| tl;dr: Windows GUIs and toolkits are usually not designed with
| compatibility and resizeability in mind and break if you change
| the looks of anything (beyond just changing colors).
| solarkraft wrote:
| > Windows GUIs and toolkits are usually not designed with
| compatibility and resizeability in mind and break if you
| change the looks of anything
|
| More often than not they don't even look designed.
| fenesiistvan wrote:
| They could add an opt-in flag for this per process. So
| developers could just turn on some "moderngui" flag in their
| win32 apps and with some little adjustements most of the apps
| could be modernized.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Those exist. The Win32 Common Controls libraries are
| versioned and applications can opt in to them with
| rebuilds. There are also "application manifests" where in
| some cases an EXE can claim that "I know I was built with
| an earlier version of Common Controls, but I do the right
| things with them and was built with forward compatibility
| in mind so please display them the newer way".
|
| The problem with opt-in flags is that it still requires
| active application developer work (keeping up to date on
| dependencies; sometimes worse, keeping up to date on future
| dependencies and learning their restrictions needs) and
| still can't solve the inconsistency issues from
| applications developed by people that don't exist anymore
| or don't have a maintenance budget or the source code was
| lost or...
| GiorgioG wrote:
| I'm still pissed they haven't fixed Windows Explorer's "Open
| with..." popup since they Metro-ified it. It used to be you could
| type-to-select from the list of apps...now I have to use the
| mouse to scroll down.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| Sad truth is that nobody cares. Not the users, not the makers. It
| would take a minuscule fraction of Microsoft's resources to fix
| this, especially when they are anyway making a new OS. But other
| considerations take precedence, since nobody really cares if
| textboxes look alike.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Check WinUI Github repository 2000 issues and mounting, do the
| same for other UI stacks, not sure where those resources would
| come from.
|
| They even had to restaff Forms and WPF teams, because with UWP
| they were reallocated to something else.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| For me, this is a blessing in disguise. Modern UI design is to
| pad everything out with reams of whitespace, hide elements that
| no longer fit behind a "...", then remove any affordances in
| the name of "cleanliness". At least some parts of windows
| reflect a more sane design language from an older era.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >It would take a minuscule fraction of Microsoft's resources to
| fix this
|
| This isn't true, almost each thing would require at least a UI
| rewrite to get them up to consistency or you'd just have a task
| of trying to hack the ten or so UI frameworks to look the same
| but they wouldn't act or feel the same.
|
| I don't think it's impossible but you need a product focused
| exec who cares enough about it to basically demand a few of the
| apps or panels be rewritten each version and keep sending it
| back until it looks right.
|
| Has to come from the top because a designer going around and
| trying to get them to rewrite say Device Manager to make it
| feel up to date and stop flickering isn't ever going to
| convince anyone.
|
| Of course every step of the way reviewers and your own
| community are going to be shouting at you for changing 20 year
| old UIs. It'll be a thankless task until 10 years after it's
| done when they come to terms with the change and realize they
| finally have a consistent Windows.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Also Microsoft doesn't have anywhere near enough resources to
| rebuild three decades of Windows software and they have made
| it a strong point that they don't want to break compatibility
| with applications built 20/30 years ago. Even changing the
| sizes of controls by a single pixel to old controls can
| sometimes cause bugs and compatibility nightmares Microsoft
| can't test for nor easily fix.
| crocoduck wrote:
| They don't care because they have no taste, it's sad that the
| dominant personal computing platform is utterly tasteless (from
| a design and technical perspective).
| raydev wrote:
| As a longtime iOS engineer trying to prototype something on
| Windows, I did not realize how good I've had it while working
| with UIKit.
|
| I just want Microsoft to give me the one true Blessed Way to
| write Windows apps. Instead it seems like there are 5 true
| Blessed Ways, and if I want something performant I need to use 20
| year old APIs?
|
| I was going to dig in to GDI+ for fast text styling performance
| but saw an offhand comment in some forum today that you can use
| DirectX for performant text rendering. How do people discover
| this information under normal circumstances?
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| They might be the fanciest or laden with trendy buzzwords, but
| when it comes to building functional, pleasant to use apps,
| UIKit and AppKit are still hard to beat. If they became
| deployable on other platforms (Android and Windows/Linux,
| respectively) I don't think I'd ever use anything else.
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| Maybe I'm just being pedantic, but when an OS uses 4+ different
| design languages across all the system software, While it has
| little to no effect on my ability to get work done, I simply
| prefer looking at a pretty, consistent UI.
|
| To be fair, macOS isn't perfect either, especially with some of
| the system apps that have become the iOS equivalent running on
| macOS in the past years. Although I do find macOS to have greater
| consistency overall than Windows.
| queuebert wrote:
| Apple's UI design peaked several versions ago, and now it is a
| slow descent into random design changes for the sake of
| maintaining the salaries of their designers.
| 65 wrote:
| I disagree. I was skeptical about Big Sur. I loved the look
| of the Mountain Lion days, through Sierra, up to Catalina.
| Big Sur felt like a big difference that I wouldn't like. But,
| I switched over and have found that Big Sur is actually a
| nice upgrade visually from Catalina.
|
| One thing I really love is the visual indicators in the menu
| bar. For example, I like the icons when I'm connecting to a
| Bluetooth device. I also find that Finder is pretty clean and
| nice to use, among other things.
|
| Obviously it's all subjective but I think Big Sur is probably
| the nicest looking/feeling version of macOS yet. It seems
| like the "Mountain Lion was the best" way of thinking is
| mostly just nostalgia.
| mafalda wrote:
| I would not call "Mountain Lion was the best" just
| nostalgia. The UI was more concise and polished in general.
| Consider the Big Sur sidebar, on some Apps it acts a
| shortcut list, on other as a tab bar and on others its used
| to host hierarchical views. It not only does not improve
| the UX in a functionality, it also breaks the reading flow
| as we need to look in the toolbar (left to right) and then
| on sidebar (top-bottom) as Apple is pushing developers to
| use it. It's not to say that skeuomorphic design was
| perfect too.
|
| Using Mountain Lion in 2021 is going to feel less aesthetic
| than Big Sur just as using System 8 in 2011 felt. Overall
| consistency and sizing of Mountain Lion is superior to Big
| Sur if you consider a keyboard and mouse based OS just as
| Big Sur is superior if you're used to touch input and
| modern iOS UI.
| queuebert wrote:
| Agree. A desktop OS has different needs than a mobile OS,
| and Apple is trying to foist iOS onto its desktop users
| under the guise of progress, but really nothing has
| fundamentally changed about using a keyboard and mouse to
| interact with the computer in decades. And that
| experience is very different, if you are skilled, than
| using fingers.
|
| Of note, macOS has always been very good at having
| consistent keyboard shortcuts across apps, something
| Linux is still trying to learn.
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