> Sadly, almost nobody uses Win32 scroll bars any more. Everybody uses frameworks that provide their own custom scroll bars.

Yeah and, sadly, those framework implementations are all mired in some amount of bollocks due to lack of care, attention, or interest from their creators. And by bollocks I mean they either behave differently or do less.

But I very much miss the days of consistent UX across Windows applications, or indeed applications on any other OS.

I don’t mind if you want a custom look and feel for your application: I very much do mind if your widgets don’t behave like other widgets of the same type or, at least, where any variance is at least a superset of OS level functionality rather than a crippled subset.

I was always frustrated by how hard Microsoft made this as time wore on and they moved through more and more UI frameworks, and then offerings like CEF and Electron entered the mix as well. The UI story on Windows started getting particularly messy around 2007 or so and has been in an awful state of confusion for at least 15 years now.

I literally have no idea what I’d use to develop a Windows desktop app nowadays and, honestly, none of the options fill me with enthusiasm. With more recent desktop experiments, partly because whilst I might want them to run on Windows I don’t primarily work on Windows, I’ve gone the Rust + Qt route simply because it offers native performance and it doesn’t feel like I’m getting rug pulled by either set of creators any time soon.

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kccqzy 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I don’t mind if you want a custom look and feel for your application

I would go further and say that I don’t want a custom look and feel for each app unless the app is a game, especially if your app is a regular line of business app. The default Win32 widgets are good enough. The default Cocoa widgets are also good enough.

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EvanAnderson 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I want apps to use the default widgets because I want theming and color selection in the OS to work again. That's about the extent I care about look and feel. Microsoft has ruined that on current Windows versions anyway-- making me resort to registry modifications to get the colors I want. Every time I see an application with a "dark mode", which should be an OS-wide theme function, I get a little sad at the wasted developer time.

Beyond the now-denied choice of UI color scheme I do not expect (or even desire) deriving any joy or pleasure from the look and feel of software I use. Most of my computing is for "work"-- be that my job, or paying bills, shopping, etc. I want the UI to get out of my way and, most of all, not to insult my 30+ years of muscle memory and visual intuition. I derive joy and pleasure from software that allows me to quickly accomplish my tasks with minimal thought or friction on my part.

I experience massive frustration with software using UI widgets that don't work like the native OS. Not having the standard keyboard shortcuts, for example, is a great way to make me hate your software. It's an immediate "tell" that I'm going to be disappointed if a program has bad tab order on its UI elements, for example.

Moreover, eschewing the time-tested and battle-hardened native UI widgets speaks to arrogance. It feels like an ego trip and it's almost certainly unearned. Random developers probably can't pull off a widget replacement that replicates all the nuance of the native. Good luck pulling off accessibility and internationalization, too. Even if they can how is reinventing that wheel a good use of their time?

My rage is amplified when I find bugs in software with non-native widgets. They had time to dick around with the widgets-- something already done for them in a vastly more competent and comprehensive manner for free-- but not to ship bug-free code for the software's actual purpose?

The same goes for animations, fades, gradients, etc. The vast majority of software I use is not special or dear to me. It's a tool. I don't want to, in a manner of speaking, look at pictures of the developers kids or vacations as a "toll" for using the software. Making software "pretty" is only self-serving and egotistical.

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bartread 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, I think that’s probably fair. Games and media apps certainly get a pass from me. Not so much corporate chat apps that are shipped as part of the most popular productivity suite in history (as one example).

Also agree with you on both Win32 and Cocoa widgets.

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izacus 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The designers of your software and their bosses disagree though, default widgets don't provide "branding" and allow the poor designers to express themselves.

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the__alchemist 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anecdote: I do it not because I want a custom feel, but because I want my programs to work on Windows, Linux, and Mac without any special per-OS work. Granted, perhaps the framework I've been using could use native APIs smartly instead of its own...

FWIW I think your Rust + Qt route is fantastic. I've been using Rust + EGUI myself, but have Qt in mind for future projects.

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doodpants 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I literally have no idea what I’d use to develop a Windows desktop app nowadays

C#/.NET and WinForms is still a viable choice. Though for a new project I might try WPF, for a slightly more modern appearance.

	▲	bartread 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're right, it is. I did a lot of C#/WinForms development back in the day. I never liked it but I liked the people I worked with and the company I worked for so I tolerated it. Reasons? OK, this is going back about 20 years but, and without going on a massive ranty screed [EDIT: oops, failed], compare something like Swing's JTable to WinForms' DataGrid. One is a really nicely designed and abstracted component with a fully pluggable architecture and an out of the box capability to deal with an arbitrarily large data model (perhaps within the limits of 32-bit integers) and the other... isn't. I tried with DataGrid, I really did. I thought other developers at my employer were "doing it wrong" by reaching for third party controls from the likes of DevExpress and Actipro but... they weren't: I was wrong. If you wanted a proper table/grid control that was easy to customise and extend and wouldn't chunder on millions and millions of rows of data you forked over the money to DevExpress for their control and then you got on with your day solving your real problems that you could charge customers actual money for. We leaned hard on third party control libraries from DevExpress (particularly grid and tree), Actipro (wizard), and Syncfusion (again, grid). To me, with WinForms, and bearing in mind I'd come from Java Swing (which is by no means perfect) it was really weird working with a UI toolkit where what came in the box wasn't sufficient to build any arbitrarily complex UI I might desire. Weird. And frustrating. Same for the lack of abstraction/separation of concerns. In my Java days, when I wanted a wizard I ripped the one out of NetBeans: I did that in at least two prior jobs using it as the basis for multiple wizards across the relevant applications. And WPF... although architecturally a lot better, IIRC it didn't even have a proper table/grid control: you had to build your own, and when you start thinking about how rich a proper table/grid is, taking into account accessibility, keyboard shortcuts, picking up OS level settings (palette, scaling, etc.), making it behave like a table in any other application on Windows, I just couldn't be bothered building all that... so then it's back to third parties again. I don't know what third party support for these frameworks is like nowadays but, fundamentally, for the sort of independent experiments I'm working on I don't want to either (i) fork over hundreds or thousands of dollars to third parties for (I think) basic functionality that (I think) should be available as part of the framework and should have been there since day one, or (ii) spend time wrangling the framework to implement this basic functionality because it isn't a core part of the problem I'm trying to solve or the value I'm trying to deliver. I'd rather just use Qt or something, which at least has what I need.