4 ms·

How do you make your win32 app look good to the average person?

by feznyng 7mo ago

themafia 7mo ago
If your application saves me time (is intuitive) or enables me to do tasks that I couldn't do before (is powerful) then I don't care one whit what it looks like. As long as it doesn't actively hurt my eyes to stare at you can do whatever you want.
- feznyng 7mo ago
  Sure, if I'm building something for myself or fellow hobbyists this approach works (though in that case I'd prefer a good TUI/CLI). But if you're building an app for the average person, how it looks has a big effect on whether they choose it over an alternative.
  - rkagerer 7mo ago
    It's funny, the "modern" look has become a countersignal for me. If the app looks like a webpage, I instinctively don't want it. Not because of aesthetics, but simply because I've come to associate that style of appearance with a lack of (or awkward) keyboard shortcuts, featuresets dumbed down to a level appropriate for chimps, various nags injecting friction against getting work done (ads, feature tours, logins, update reminders, etc) and laggy, resource-squandering performance thanks to some kind of bloated rendering framework like Electron with multiple V8 hosting processes sprawled across chrome.exe instances or whatever. Case in point, the Dropbox Simplified Desktop App was a huge improvement for me. It nails just about everything I ever needed their app to do, and removes all the user-hostile fluff I never asked for. Similarly, I found Windows 11 Enterprise IoT LTSC to offer an improved desktop experience compared to traditional Windows, thanks to its exclusion of a lot of the cruft Microsoft otherwise shoves down the throats of users who, as far as I can tell from frank discussions with many of them, likewise actively don't want. I'm not saying your desire to make your app look polished means it's crap, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Just like fashion, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a shift in the aesthetics trend as more people discover a retro feel sometimes signals a better user experience.
  - nananana9 7mo ago
    Programmers and designers thinking the average person is a moron is one of the two reasons almost no good software is writren today.
    - SoftTalker 7mo ago
      What's the other reason?
      - nananana9 6mo ago
        That most programmers are not that great at programming, and wouldn't be able to produce high quality software even if that was their stated goal.
userbinator 7mo ago
Depends what you mean by "look good". The main function of the app being discussed here is to draw solid black rectangles on the screen. Don't forget the "average person", I'm assuming someone relying on software as a tool, doesn't care about the stuff "designers" seem to obsess over, and will actively hate if you break their workflow by doing things like adding useless padding that makes them scroll more or shows less information in the name of "modernity". There's a lot of specialized niche software for various industries, often very expensive too, which looks like it came out in the early 90s. As long as it works well, users won't complain.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- lelandfe 7mo ago
  There's a pretty simple settings window: https://github.com/domenic/display-blackout?tab=readme-ov-file#screenshots https://github.com/domenic/display-blackout?tab=readme-ov-fi... Would that UI be hard to accomplish?
  - bloomca 7mo ago
    You mean conceptually or to match it? Native components are pretty much impossible to match without actually using the native framework which provides them, so you need WinUI/WPF. Win32 provides its own components which are basically Win95 style apps, and you can draw the components using some graphics APIs by yourself. The whole native development area is a mess exactly because making your own (decent) renderer is a huge undertaking.
    - Onavo 7mo ago
      But you are making false equivalence, the Win32 GUI API is decades out of date from modern UIs. I can use flutter and make a pixel perfect equivalent of the above UI in an hour, with the exact same responsiveness behavior on both windows tablets and desktop, and scales perfectly in high DPI displays. 3 hours if you want the toggle animation timing to be exactly the same. I came from the WinForms world so don't pretend I don't understand Win32 programming. The fault lies with Microsoft for not investing in it more.
alt227 7mo ago
Disable borders and design your app nicely with images to replace standard user input elements.
- VerifiedReports 7mo ago
  That sounds like a great way to make a mess. Look at Microsoft's own apps shunning proper File dialogs and instead presenting a giant, bizarre pane of mostly text and a few crudely-drawn boxes in order to save a file. You have no idea what you're looking at or where you are in the file system. Then there's the removal of title bars from Windows. You often have no idea what app you're looking at. Pull up a PDF in Acrobat and also in Edge. Now, at a glance, which is which? Regressive garbage.
  - p-t 6mo ago
    > removal of title bars they did what??? [i'm still on 10 because 11 won't run on my laptop </3]
    - VerifiedReports 6mo ago
      Yes. It's an absolute mess.
      - p-t 6mo ago
        God, i finally understand why people hate on windows xD
perching_aix 7mo ago
They really don't. Though if Microsoft wanted to, they could solve that too. For example, the OS control panel used to be extendable. Technically still is, just not the new one (and of course both remain). Then you could have this UI or something very similar to it right in there. Several integration points like this have been removed, supposedly because third party software was just too bad in how they used them, causing issues. Or at least so goes Microsoft's perspective. Personally, I find that very believable! If by integration points the only thing one can imagine is calling into random third party code on the regular that the user has installed, bang spank in the middle of critical user flows, on the same thread and in the same process as itself, that's exactly the kind of grief I'd expect to occur... If only there was a way to provide a way to craft e.g. custom flyout menus for the taskbar or custom pages in the Settings app, without invoking arbitrary third party code and possibly causing crashes and hangs in system apps and menus... or just not letting crashes and hangs affect the application (e.g. Windows Explorer) calling them in the first place.

How do you make your win32 app look good to the average person?

by feznyng 7mo ago

How do you make your win32 app look good to the average person?

If your application saves me time (is intuitive) or enables me to do tasks that I couldn't do before (is powerful) then I don't care one whit what it looks like. As long as it doesn't actively hurt my eyes to stare at you can do whatever you want.

feznyng 7mo ago
Sure, if I'm building something for myself or fellow hobbyists this approach works (though in that case I'd prefer a good TUI/CLI). But if you're building an app for the average person, how it looks has a big effect on whether they choose it over an alternative.
- rkagerer 7mo ago
  It's funny, the "modern" look has become a countersignal for me. If the app looks like a webpage, I instinctively don't want it. Not because of aesthetics, but simply because I've come to associate that style of appearance with a lack of (or awkward) keyboard shortcuts, featuresets dumbed down to a level appropriate for chimps, various nags injecting friction against getting work done (ads, feature tours, logins, update reminders, etc) and laggy, resource-squandering performance thanks to some kind of bloated rendering framework like Electron with multiple V8 hosting processes sprawled across chrome.exe instances or whatever. Case in point, the Dropbox Simplified Desktop App was a huge improvement for me. It nails just about everything I ever needed their app to do, and removes all the user-hostile fluff I never asked for. Similarly, I found Windows 11 Enterprise IoT LTSC to offer an improved desktop experience compared to traditional Windows, thanks to its exclusion of a lot of the cruft Microsoft otherwise shoves down the throats of users who, as far as I can tell from frank discussions with many of them, likewise actively don't want. I'm not saying your desire to make your app look polished means it's crap, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Just like fashion, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a shift in the aesthetics trend as more people discover a retro feel sometimes signals a better user experience.
- nananana9 7mo ago
  Programmers and designers thinking the average person is a moron is one of the two reasons almost no good software is writren today.
  - SoftTalker 7mo ago
    What's the other reason?
    - nananana9 6mo ago
      That most programmers are not that great at programming, and wouldn't be able to produce high quality software even if that was their stated goal.

userbinator 7mo ago

Depends what you mean by "look good". The main function of the app being discussed here is to draw solid black rectangles on the screen. Don't forget the "average person", I'm assuming someone relying on software as a tool, doesn't care about the stuff "designers" seem to obsess over, and will actively hate if you break their workflow by doing things like adding useless padding that makes them scroll more or shows less information in the name of "modernity". There's a lot of specialized niche software for various industries, often very expensive too, which looks like it came out in the early 90s. As long as it works well, users won't complain.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
lelandfe 7mo ago
There's a pretty simple settings window: https://github.com/domenic/display-blackout?tab=readme-ov-file#screenshots https://github.com/domenic/display-blackout?tab=readme-ov-fi... Would that UI be hard to accomplish?
- bloomca 7mo ago
  You mean conceptually or to match it? Native components are pretty much impossible to match without actually using the native framework which provides them, so you need WinUI/WPF. Win32 provides its own components which are basically Win95 style apps, and you can draw the components using some graphics APIs by yourself. The whole native development area is a mess exactly because making your own (decent) renderer is a huge undertaking.
  - Onavo 7mo ago
    But you are making false equivalence, the Win32 GUI API is decades out of date from modern UIs. I can use flutter and make a pixel perfect equivalent of the above UI in an hour, with the exact same responsiveness behavior on both windows tablets and desktop, and scales perfectly in high DPI displays. 3 hours if you want the toggle animation timing to be exactly the same. I came from the WinForms world so don't pretend I don't understand Win32 programming. The fault lies with Microsoft for not investing in it more.

alt227 7mo ago

Disable borders and design your app nicely with images to replace standard user input elements.

VerifiedReports 7mo ago
That sounds like a great way to make a mess. Look at Microsoft's own apps shunning proper File dialogs and instead presenting a giant, bizarre pane of mostly text and a few crudely-drawn boxes in order to save a file. You have no idea what you're looking at or where you are in the file system. Then there's the removal of title bars from Windows. You often have no idea what app you're looking at. Pull up a PDF in Acrobat and also in Edge. Now, at a glance, which is which? Regressive garbage.
- p-t 6mo ago
  > removal of title bars they did what??? [i'm still on 10 because 11 won't run on my laptop </3]
  - VerifiedReports 6mo ago
    Yes. It's an absolute mess.
    - p-t 6mo ago
      God, i finally understand why people hate on windows xD

perching_aix 7mo ago

They really don't. Though if Microsoft wanted to, they could solve that too. For example, the OS control panel used to be extendable. Technically still is, just not the new one (and of course both remain). Then you could have this UI or something very similar to it right in there. Several integration points like this have been removed, supposedly because third party software was just too bad in how they used them, causing issues. Or at least so goes Microsoft's perspective. Personally, I find that very believable! If by integration points the only thing one can imagine is calling into random third party code on the regular that the user has installed, bang spank in the middle of critical user flows, on the same thread and in the same process as itself, that's exactly the kind of grief I'd expect to occur... If only there was a way to provide a way to craft e.g. custom flyout menus for the taskbar or custom pages in the Settings app, without invoking arbitrary third party code and possibly causing crashes and hangs in system apps and menus... or just not letting crashes and hangs affect the application (e.g. Windows Explorer) calling them in the first place.