Its not the GUI developers fault usually, it's the platform's fault.

Nobody can decide on standards because everyone is greedy. Microsoft has, like, a dozen GUI platforms and they're all Windows-only. Apple doesn't even use an off the shelf rendering API. And android is... Well, android.

Sure, I would like to use the OS provided controls. And then maybe after that we can all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.

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DanielHB 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

You are 100% right, we have messy incompatible systems because there is no standardization. It is arguable that standardization of something that is so subjective is always going to be problematic. Design patterns are invented all the time and they start to infect other applications/platforms and mutate over time.

The only reason the original post think that "used to be a solved problem" was because we used to have a standard for guis: win32. But obviously people wanted more powerful/flexible UIs and more importantly, cross platform guis so it eventually died off.

A lot of design innovation came because the web is extremely flexible while at the same time being extremely non-standardized.

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gus_tpm 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I honestly don't think it's really all down to being greedy. Even the Linux desktop suffers from this to some extent.

I think it's because UI design is very much something that can't really be "solved" in the traditional sense, so a lot of us use our own opinions when we inevitably find a corner case that isn't working exactly the way we want.

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skydhash 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> a lot of us use our own opinions when we inevitably find a corner case that isn't working exactly the way we want.

Most standard toolkits provide escape hatches to have your custom components. I think most designers wants their view imposed to the users instead of following the platform constraints. Like instead of the standard play/pause button every player have, they want their own custom ones. Instead of using the standard tree widget, they want to create another that is the same, but behaves a bit differently. And then they say GTK is not good, let's go with HTML in Electron.

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const_cast 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Linux has two application toolkits and they work pretty well together. Windows, again, has a dozen. And they're closed source. Microsoft could just... not... do that. They control the entire thing. But they chose to do it.

Greed is maybe not the right word, but maybe it's more like ideological greed. Like everyone wants things their way 100%. They won't settle for 99%!

Like okay, with Apple and vulkan and metal, is vulkan the best API? No. Is it the most performant? No.

But it's pretty fucking good. Its 95% of the way there. But for greedy apple, that's not good enough. So they say "fuck you, heres metal, good luck developers!"

And now people only make Mac apps if there's a gun to their head and they really need that tiny slice of market share.

Its the same thing with Qt versus bespoke UIs in ImGUI or whatever. Qt is really, really good. Its not perfect.

But we're really gonna burn it all down and start over for like... a 1% improvement in code architecture or something? Really? We're chopping off both our legs so that our pinky finger hurts slightly less?

Sigh. Okay. Such is the way of developers, I guess.

	▲	cindyllm 3 days ago \| parent [-]
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peacebeard 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Furthermore, part of the unspoken role of the platform is showing off your brand’s personality with your flashy custom UI. For many, using standard components would be missing the point. Part of the product is the vibes and the website conveys the vibes.