3 ms·
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 othe
by corty 5y ago
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 5y ago> 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 5y agoThey 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 5y agoThose 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…
- pjmlp 5y agoIncluding Microsoft own teams. Manifests are a thing since Windows 2000, as they were also introduced to sort out registry issues, and go back into xcopy deployments. Yet even Microsoft's own teams keep putting into the registry what should be in manifest files.