I sometimes wonder how much slower technological progression would have been, if we hadn't taken whatever widget engine any given OS gave us, and instead constantly debated over and recreated every feature in the OS, like we do with web interfaces.

The crazies part is that when we actually research it, a default button is about 20% faster than the the flat nonsense we've settled on (https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2017/09/05/its-official-...) and nearly a decade letter we still prefer looks over usability.

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sheept 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Isn't that alternate reality the current reality?

For whatever reason, developers and some users expect an app to look the same across all platforms, while also looking distinct from other apps—otherwise, the app looks indistinguishable from a low effort one. This involves creating a design system and departing from each operating system's native widgets.

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noduerme 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is really an Apple thing, rigidly enforcing whatever their current OS aesthetic looks like. But Apple (or Xerox) invented the UI paradigms we're still living with.

Look at the progress of Flash/AIR AS3 as an embedded runtime prior to its annihilation. By 2010 or so, it had the capability to leverage the GPU on pretty much any device, directly uploading bitmaps and shaders. It had garbage collection as good as or better than any existing [modern] JS engine, had strong types and compile time errors. It was better and cleaner than the modern fractured Typescript-and-canvas web app gaming paradigm in every respect, except for one: It was closed source.

I'm not a fan of AS3's demise, nor of the current state of affairs. We are stuck a decade ago because of it.

But I can also imagine a world where Adobe has a stranglehold in 2026 on most cross-platform game development, and where little arose to compete with it outside their ecosystem. And they've become such a hideous company blinded to their users, even without the advantage they used to have of dominating browser plugins, that I can see now maybe it was for the best that they're not the guardians of the way we do things anymore.

The anarchic process of creating standards is messy, and it results in a huge amount of wasted effort by developers. And it's often a lot less fun.

On the other hand, the job is to make shit using whatever is available.

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whstl 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

IMO a bigger nail in the coffin of native interfaces was Microsoft writing a new widget library that was supposed to be better than the previous over and over again, but to this day never quite making any of them official.

Instead, I've had people from Microsoft itself recommending me to "just write it in HTML, there's no standard" and "accessibility sucks with native".

When you have the market leader telling you to write HTML for their OS, it's a carte blanche to do it everywhere.

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Cthulhu_ 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> This is really an Apple thing, rigidly enforcing whatever their current OS aesthetic looks like.

It's not just that I think, using their native components also ensures accessibility and consistent UX throughout different apps, which is a huge benefit to e.g. screen reader users. Everyone else - especially web interface builders, especially if they eschew just using native elements - reinvents the wheel and considers accessibility as an afterthought.

At least we have laws now that mandate accessible websites for corporates, in addition to government sites.

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master-lincoln 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> except for one: It was closed source.

And it was a security nightmare...

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thyristan 2 hours ago | parent [-]

..., slow and resource-hungry, prone to crash, ...

	▲	Sankozi an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Slower than pages with HTML+CSS with tiny bit of JS. Much faster and leaner than current JS SPAs.