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Sciter's author here. > HTML/CSS based native interfaces are some of the hardest to use, least reliable, least accessible, least robust interfaces I encounter

Sciter's author here. > HTML/CSS based native interfaces are some of the hardest to use, least reliable, least accessible, least robust interfaces I encounter This has nothing with HTML/CSS per se but rather questions to particular products. Same complain may apply to any UI. > The best native apps look and behave natively; "Native app" term these days is something almost non existent. In these terms Microsoft Office is not a native app as they use custom UI framework for UI. Pretty much whole Window 10 UI now is not "native" in this sense. UWP is a custom UI layer that uses windowless DirectX based UI. There are some low level utilities left in dusted corners of Windows that can be classified as "native" but there are just few of them - no one cares. Consider my https://html-notepad.com https://html-notepad.com as an example (purely sciter app and so HTML/CSS UI), this application simply cannot use "native UI". No OS has needed components out of the box. Yet pretty much any modern app must have one way to another to render and to produce HTML - we want our applications to be connected (read: interact with the Web).

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cosmotic 6y ago
UWP are an interesting example. They are the most 'native' (at least looking) kind of application on windows 10 but I realize they aren't using win32 (which I think is what we both mean when we refer to native). Regardless, UWP are terrible; they are very hard to use and look awful, if not flat and uncluttered. Office is a bad example as well; that team is notorious for choosing new/different interface controls just to be different. They try to back it up with studies but the studies are flawed. Accordion and Ribbon come to mind, as does the silly fake shadow they had a few years ago. Still to this day, the drab boring win32 applications are the best performing and easiest to use.
- c-smile 6y ago
  > drab boring win32 applications For example?
  - cosmotic 6y ago
    Miranda IM has always been a solid IM client. All the utility apps that look like they are from windows 2000 work great. All the old control panel apps that UWP/Metro settings app still rely on for a lot of their settings still work better than the pc settings app. All the light-weight notepad clones are great, my fave is notepad3.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cosmotic 6y ago

UWP are an interesting example. They are the most 'native' (at least looking) kind of application on windows 10 but I realize they aren't using win32 (which I think is what we both mean when we refer to native). Regardless, UWP are terrible; they are very hard to use and look awful, if not flat and uncluttered. Office is a bad example as well; that team is notorious for choosing new/different interface controls just to be different. They try to back it up with studies but the studies are flawed. Accordion and Ribbon come to mind, as does the silly fake shadow they had a few years ago. Still to this day, the drab boring win32 applications are the best performing and easiest to use.

c-smile 6y ago
> drab boring win32 applications For example?
- cosmotic 6y ago
  Miranda IM has always been a solid IM client. All the utility apps that look like they are from windows 2000 work great. All the old control panel apps that UWP/Metro settings app still rely on for a lot of their settings still work better than the pc settings app. All the light-weight notepad clones are great, my fave is notepad3.