4 ms·

Yeah, weird-shaped windows are definitely not something that should make a comeback. Just because you could doesn't mean you should. > Today, all Windows deskt

by Sharlin 6mo ago

Yeah, weird-shaped windows are definitely not something that should make a comeback. Just because you could doesn't mean you should. > Today, all Windows desktop apps look the same as they are the same; they are all built on crap React, Electron, electronbun, and Tauri browser wrappers that mimic the real Desktop apps. Desktop apps should look the same because they should use the OS GUI framework; that has nothing to do with React and Electron. I can't quite understand this argument; being webview based enables applications to look different from each other, like websites do, not similar. If they still do look similar, that's a good thing. > The point was usually not usability. It was identity. Yeah. And usability is sort of a big deal. Applications that implement their own widgets or color schemes or nonstandard shapes usually pay zero attention to usability or accessibility. They almost invariably lack all standard affordances and disregard the standard UX guidelines. Also, ironically the applications with the most "identity" today tend to be control panels and other accessories by HW manufacturers bundled with device drivers, and they also happen to be the crappiest, most terrible bloatware that an average user is likely to encounter.

hnthrowaway0315 6mo ago
I don't know. They look cool. If someone wants to bring them back it's a viable option. I'd definitely welcome it.
jordand 6mo ago
Accessibility is really important as well, as there's different laws and regulations covering people's rights here too. Modern cross-platform GUI frameworks (as heavy as they can be) have no issues supporting screen readers and HiDPI for people with sight difficulties.
reddalo 6mo ago
> that has nothing to do with React and Electron Not only that, but I think that Electron leads to the opposite problem: all apps look and behave differently, they don't follow platform guidelines, they look out of place.
- shooly 6mo ago
  > they don't follow platform guidelines Do platforms even follow their own guidelines? And if they do, are those guidelines good? Microsoft doesn't seem to care about UI/UX at all, Apple's UI/UX quality gets worse each year, and Linux is all over the place with each distro doing its own thing. What guidelines are those apps supposed to follow? Looking at the current state of things, I think it's good that apps tend to do whatever they think is best for their use case. Also, most people don't switch between 100 different apps all the time.
- 1313ed01 6mo ago
  I never had a problem with that. I want a specific application to behave the same no matter where I run it. I do not want my muscle memory for how to use an application to be confused by an application not looking or behaving the way I am used to when moving to a different platform. Of course all the applications bundled with a specific OS should be designed to work the same and work well together. It still makes sense to have guidelines and standard widgets in a system. But I prefer very much any third-party multi-platform app to be identical everywhere I run it. Not to defend Electron. There are many native frameworks that work the way I prefer, looking the same across platforms.
  - PaulHoule 6mo ago
    I use probably 70% Windows, 20% iPad, 5% Meta Quest 3 [1], and 5% MacOS -- for the latter though it is mostly "test that something works on MacOS" and "tech support for the computer the family uses". I like web-based applications that behave the same everywhere. Personally I feel the MacOS widget set is a touch old fashioned, a little ugly and gauche. I can see though why somebody might like the MacOS terminal better than CMD.EXE. The dominant theme on Windows is that Windows has several widget sets that aren't consistent but the average user doesn't notice or care -- probably the worst area is the settings dialogs which seem to be mostly migrated to a Metro-based design lately. I was afraid before they wouldn't finish that migration before they churned to another framework but I think they've stopped the churn. The best windows applications, in my mind, steal from web technology -- like they are either using some kind of HTML-based UI or they are made by people who grew up making web applications and reproduce those patterns w/ the desktop widget sets. [1] I've got some web applications I wrote that run perfectly on the MQ3, especially after I got target sizes up to WCAG AAA level and it is fun to put the headset on and crash out on the couch and get things done
ghighi7878 6mo ago
You're thinking of apps for work. There's no reason why people should not be able to have fun when not working
- Sharlin 6mo ago
  Am I? Why would you assume that? Do you think that usability and accessibility are only important for work?
tdeck 6mo ago
Quite. And the era when everyone was trying to "do their own thing" with UI design wasn't exactly pleasant or usable. Just have a look at some of these designs, for example http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/mshame.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/mshame.htm
- RajT88 6mo ago
  Ahh, but I do miss all the weird phones from 1998 - 2008. I think it's ultimately the same process at work.
vunderba 6mo ago
Agreed. I remember seeing quite a few non-standard designs in the days of Vista, especially when Microsoft was heavily promoting the Windows Presentation Foundation framework and using XAML for UI design. The problem with setups like this is that the moment you need to resize them, place them in a specific spot, or move them to a larger or smaller monitor, they tend to scale terribly and end up causing all kinds of “death by a thousand cuts” issues.
VerifiedReports 6mo ago
Not to mention that the statement is wrong. Windows applications do NOT look the same, and that's bad. Oh... except for their lack of a title bar, which prevents you from telling which application you're looking at. Is this PDF open in Edge, or Acrobat? Who knows. The windows look the same. Beyond that... it's a disgraceful mess. You have applications now with no menu bar, but instead a bunch of hamburger buttons and "gear" buttons scattered all over the place. And common, standard functions like "save file" are further hidden behind "more" labels even in THOSE menus. Another example of Windows's galling regression: the abolition of the File dialog in many apps, which have replaced it with a giant page of crudely-drawn, unlabeled, super-wide text boxes and a bunch of plain text. There's no file structure shown, so you have no idea where you are about to save a file... It's truly a clinic on dogshit UI. Pathetic.
- ConceptJunkie 6mo ago
  Companies like IBM and Microsoft did a lot of HCI research back in the 80s, and made a lot of progress with usability and common idioms that all software followed. Then when displays with 256 or more colors became common, all that went out the window. All those Windows Media Player skins were awful because they used so much screen real estate on dead space. Whereas the plethora of Winamp skins kept the economy of screen real estate while still providing unique and imaginative visuals. The whole skeuomorphic trend starting in the mid-90s was similarly awful for the same reason. First, it was often hard to tell what was a control and what was just decoration. Second, it often took trial and error to figure out what was what. And, as I mentioned above, these designs almost inevitably wasted huge chunks of screen space on decoration that provided no functionality. Of course, we have the opposite problem now. All windows look the same. Title bars are mostly gone. And since companies like Microsoft replaced all their HCI experts with art-school dropouts who think the "flat" look with low contrast is cool, not only can you not tell what app you're looking at. Half the time you can't even tell where one window stops and another starts. The only good UI thing that's come out of the last decade or two is a near universal support for "dark mode". Otherwise, I would greatly prefer the Windows 2000 "classic" look, or something similar.
  - 6mo ago
andai 6mo ago
> Yeah, weird-shaped windows are definitely not something that should make a comeback. Just because you could doesn't mean you should. My opinion here is the exact opposite of yours. Make computers cool again! They used to look like an alien spaceship, now everything looks like paperwork. We can make it cool again! We can make it fun. All the fun parts of life are optional.
- mostlysimilar 6mo ago
  I'm with you. It's fine if your opinion is "software = tool" and you personally want it to be utilitarian and basic, but plenty of us desire our software interfaces to have personality and customization. The answer is that we should have the option to choose.
- Sharlin 6mo ago
  I use computers for a plenty of fun, but those programs always were the digital equivalent of garden gnomes. Utterly kitschy. Just having a basic sense of aesthetics doesn't imply thinking that computers should be dull or just for work.
bel8 6mo ago
There's a wave of "desktop games" on Steam. Most of them are Idle genre or tamagochi like. For those I find these exoctic shaped windows are fun and a great differentiator. Example: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2666510/Rustys_Retirement/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2666510/Rustys_Retirement... Bundle with a ton of these games: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/48558/BottomOfYourScreen/ https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/48558/BottomOfYourScre...
ChoGGi 6mo ago
I'd rather weird windows everywhere than material design everywhere.
eviks 6mo ago
It would help if you had seething more specific to say about usability rather than blindly defending the bland conformity: for example, if your music player app looks like your physical old round CD music player, not a rectangle, how exactly does it hurt usability? > Applications that implement their own widgets or color schemes or nonstandard shapes usually pay zero attention to usability or accessibility. OS are close to this, pick any era of the constantly changing OS color schemes and widget design, and you'll find plenty of issues, with the basics of the basics - readability - suffering. So again, why should everyone be generically bad just because they wrote the "guidelines"? Sure, change doesn't mean good, but the neither does using the defaults
RunSet 6mo ago
Adobe is a notable holdout in refusing to go native.

by Sharlin 6mo ago

hnthrowaway0315 6mo ago

I don't know. They look cool. If someone wants to bring them back it's a viable option. I'd definitely welcome it.

jordand 6mo ago

Accessibility is really important as well, as there's different laws and regulations covering people's rights here too. Modern cross-platform GUI frameworks (as heavy as they can be) have no issues supporting screen readers and HiDPI for people with sight difficulties.

reddalo 6mo ago

> that has nothing to do with React and Electron Not only that, but I think that Electron leads to the opposite problem: all apps look and behave differently, they don't follow platform guidelines, they look out of place.

shooly 6mo ago
> they don't follow platform guidelines Do platforms even follow their own guidelines? And if they do, are those guidelines good? Microsoft doesn't seem to care about UI/UX at all, Apple's UI/UX quality gets worse each year, and Linux is all over the place with each distro doing its own thing. What guidelines are those apps supposed to follow? Looking at the current state of things, I think it's good that apps tend to do whatever they think is best for their use case. Also, most people don't switch between 100 different apps all the time.
1313ed01 6mo ago
I never had a problem with that. I want a specific application to behave the same no matter where I run it. I do not want my muscle memory for how to use an application to be confused by an application not looking or behaving the way I am used to when moving to a different platform. Of course all the applications bundled with a specific OS should be designed to work the same and work well together. It still makes sense to have guidelines and standard widgets in a system. But I prefer very much any third-party multi-platform app to be identical everywhere I run it. Not to defend Electron. There are many native frameworks that work the way I prefer, looking the same across platforms.
- PaulHoule 6mo ago
  I use probably 70% Windows, 20% iPad, 5% Meta Quest 3 [1], and 5% MacOS -- for the latter though it is mostly "test that something works on MacOS" and "tech support for the computer the family uses". I like web-based applications that behave the same everywhere. Personally I feel the MacOS widget set is a touch old fashioned, a little ugly and gauche. I can see though why somebody might like the MacOS terminal better than CMD.EXE. The dominant theme on Windows is that Windows has several widget sets that aren't consistent but the average user doesn't notice or care -- probably the worst area is the settings dialogs which seem to be mostly migrated to a Metro-based design lately. I was afraid before they wouldn't finish that migration before they churned to another framework but I think they've stopped the churn. The best windows applications, in my mind, steal from web technology -- like they are either using some kind of HTML-based UI or they are made by people who grew up making web applications and reproduce those patterns w/ the desktop widget sets. [1] I've got some web applications I wrote that run perfectly on the MQ3, especially after I got target sizes up to WCAG AAA level and it is fun to put the headset on and crash out on the couch and get things done

ghighi7878 6mo ago

You're thinking of apps for work. There's no reason why people should not be able to have fun when not working

Sharlin 6mo ago
Am I? Why would you assume that? Do you think that usability and accessibility are only important for work?

tdeck 6mo ago

Quite. And the era when everyone was trying to "do their own thing" with UI design wasn't exactly pleasant or usable. Just have a look at some of these designs, for example http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/mshame.htm http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/mshame.htm

RajT88 6mo ago
Ahh, but I do miss all the weird phones from 1998 - 2008. I think it's ultimately the same process at work.

vunderba 6mo ago

Agreed. I remember seeing quite a few non-standard designs in the days of Vista, especially when Microsoft was heavily promoting the Windows Presentation Foundation framework and using XAML for UI design. The problem with setups like this is that the moment you need to resize them, place them in a specific spot, or move them to a larger or smaller monitor, they tend to scale terribly and end up causing all kinds of “death by a thousand cuts” issues.

VerifiedReports 6mo ago

Not to mention that the statement is wrong. Windows applications do NOT look the same, and that's bad. Oh... except for their lack of a title bar, which prevents you from telling which application you're looking at. Is this PDF open in Edge, or Acrobat? Who knows. The windows look the same. Beyond that... it's a disgraceful mess. You have applications now with no menu bar, but instead a bunch of hamburger buttons and "gear" buttons scattered all over the place. And common, standard functions like "save file" are further hidden behind "more" labels even in THOSE menus. Another example of Windows's galling regression: the abolition of the File dialog in many apps, which have replaced it with a giant page of crudely-drawn, unlabeled, super-wide text boxes and a bunch of plain text. There's no file structure shown, so you have no idea where you are about to save a file... It's truly a clinic on dogshit UI. Pathetic.

ConceptJunkie 6mo ago
Companies like IBM and Microsoft did a lot of HCI research back in the 80s, and made a lot of progress with usability and common idioms that all software followed. Then when displays with 256 or more colors became common, all that went out the window. All those Windows Media Player skins were awful because they used so much screen real estate on dead space. Whereas the plethora of Winamp skins kept the economy of screen real estate while still providing unique and imaginative visuals. The whole skeuomorphic trend starting in the mid-90s was similarly awful for the same reason. First, it was often hard to tell what was a control and what was just decoration. Second, it often took trial and error to figure out what was what. And, as I mentioned above, these designs almost inevitably wasted huge chunks of screen space on decoration that provided no functionality. Of course, we have the opposite problem now. All windows look the same. Title bars are mostly gone. And since companies like Microsoft replaced all their HCI experts with art-school dropouts who think the "flat" look with low contrast is cool, not only can you not tell what app you're looking at. Half the time you can't even tell where one window stops and another starts. The only good UI thing that's come out of the last decade or two is a near universal support for "dark mode". Otherwise, I would greatly prefer the Windows 2000 "classic" look, or something similar.
- 6mo ago

andai 6mo ago

> Yeah, weird-shaped windows are definitely not something that should make a comeback. Just because you could doesn't mean you should. My opinion here is the exact opposite of yours. Make computers cool again! They used to look like an alien spaceship, now everything looks like paperwork. We can make it cool again! We can make it fun. All the fun parts of life are optional.

mostlysimilar 6mo ago
I'm with you. It's fine if your opinion is "software = tool" and you personally want it to be utilitarian and basic, but plenty of us desire our software interfaces to have personality and customization. The answer is that we should have the option to choose.
Sharlin 6mo ago
I use computers for a plenty of fun, but those programs always were the digital equivalent of garden gnomes. Utterly kitschy. Just having a basic sense of aesthetics doesn't imply thinking that computers should be dull or just for work.

bel8 6mo ago

There's a wave of "desktop games" on Steam. Most of them are Idle genre or tamagochi like. For those I find these exoctic shaped windows are fun and a great differentiator. Example: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2666510/Rustys_Retirement/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2666510/Rustys_Retirement... Bundle with a ton of these games: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/48558/BottomOfYourScreen/ https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/48558/BottomOfYourScre...

ChoGGi 6mo ago

I'd rather weird windows everywhere than material design everywhere.

eviks 6mo ago

It would help if you had seething more specific to say about usability rather than blindly defending the bland conformity: for example, if your music player app looks like your physical old round CD music player, not a rectangle, how exactly does it hurt usability? > Applications that implement their own widgets or color schemes or nonstandard shapes usually pay zero attention to usability or accessibility. OS are close to this, pick any era of the constantly changing OS color schemes and widget design, and you'll find plenty of issues, with the basics of the basics - readability - suffering. So again, why should everyone be generically bad just because they wrote the "guidelines"? Sure, change doesn't mean good, but the neither does using the defaults

RunSet 6mo ago

Adobe is a notable holdout in refusing to go native.