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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Maturity comes with a lot of costs. Try making a lightweight GUI framework that supports accessibility, bidirectional text, IME, multiple and different kinds of pointing devices, renders all kinds of Unicode script, DPI scaling, hardware acceleration, and so much more...

I absolutely miss those days, but only a little :) I just shrug and use Qt and be happy that at the very least, after I've fought the framework for a couple hours, an incredible amount of engineering is done on such difficult problems without me needing to try to solve them on my own in each project.

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The vast majority of the time you don't need all (or most of) that stuff though. None of the applications i actually use take any advantage of accessibility (i do not need it), bidirectional text (most all of the text i see and write is in English and all of it is in left-to-right order), IME (i do not write in any language that needs this), multiple pointing devices (i only have a single mouse), all kinds of unicode script (as i said most of the text is in English, but i'll have a note on that below), DPI scaling (i prefer 1:1 mapping of units to pixels ratio and none of my monitors are hidpi and i plan on avoiding getting one as long as it is technically possible since i want to have the pixels visible), hardware acceleration (i do not think any GUI toolkit that uses traditional buttons/checkboxes/inputfields/sliders/etc style uses hardware acceleration, at least in the modern sense where it means using 3D hardware as opposed to the older 2D acceleration - some toolkits that try to reinvent Flash are probably using 3D acceleration more but i do not use any programs that use those) or any "much more".

The note i mentioned above and a small exception is unicode support, but that is externally imposed: sometimes i download files (like an album i bought on bandcamp) that use unicode characters which display weirdly if the program you use cannot handle them. But beyond that, no real need for it and this is only in a few types of programs.

Of course my needs are not the same as others' needs, but i am "paying" for stuff i do not use nor need, both in terms of complexity and actual resources.

That’s the case for any user though. If you’re Japanese and only ever read documents in Japanese then Shift-JIS is all you need and UTF-8 is a waste of bytes. If you use a screen reader then there’s an immediate extraneous cost to your laptop or mobile phone in the form of a screen and a GPU.

The benefit though is interoperability and economies of scale. And besides, another way of saying ‘not disabled’ is ‘temporarily abled’. Who knows when you’ll need assistive tech (if ever), but you’ll appreciate the effort that’s been put into the ecosystem when you do.

> That’s the case for any user though. If you’re Japanese and only ever read documents in Japanese then Shift-JIS is all you need and UTF-8 is a waste of bytes.

Yes, i do not see the issue with it though - remember that i talked about the case where i explicitly do not care about interoperability, which is pretty much all the time. I do not see the problem to use specialized software in the rare cases where i'd need such interoperability (and again, i'm talking about myself here, not about everyone, although i suspect a lot of people rarely care about more than a single language - and note that i'm not a native English speaker).

> . If you use a screen reader then there’s an immediate extraneous cost to your laptop or mobile phone in the form of a screen and a GPU.

I'm not sure i follow, what sort of cost are you talking about?

> The benefit though is interoperability and economies of scale.

Similarly, i do not follow. I am talking about the complexity and resources needed by a GUI system.

> And besides, another way of saying ‘not disabled’ is ‘temporarily abled’. Who knows when you’ll need assistive tech (if ever)

I may also need better interoperability or any of the other features mentioned above, it isn't like my current needs are written in stone, but that is an issue to be solved when needed, if needed.

I remember Microsoft did a study on Word usage after everyone complained of bloat and the huge number of unwanted features, it turned out that each user only used maybe 5% of the features, but it was a different 5% for each user. Its the same here. Sure, you only use ASCII and don't care about RTL text or screen readers, and that would be great if the vendors were writing software only for your sole use. But they're not, because they need to fund development of the software by selling as many copies as possible to many different users...

I fully understand that which is exactly why i wrote "and again, i'm talking about myself here, not about everyone". That doesn't mean i like it though.

> none of my monitors are hidpi and i plan on avoiding getting one [...] since i want to have the pixels visible

Seriously? I can't work out what possible advantage you might think this has. There is no situation where a lower DPI monitor is better than a higher DPI one, as far as I can work out, so I'm guessing you've probably never used a high resolution screen and just don't know what you're missing? Or are there many people out there who think like this?

> Seriously? I can't work out what possible advantage you might think this has. There is no situation where a lower DPI monitor is better than a higher DPI one

My primary reason is that i just like the way it looks. However it has a few practical advantages, one being that it is very fast when it comes to 3D games (which i play a lot) and while i could lower the resolution, that would end up creating ugly image quality from the upscaling. Also i do graphics myself and being able to clearly see the pixels (note that i do not just have a low DPI monitor, i have a 27" 1080p monitor where you can clearly see the pixels) has helped me many times spot tiny issues i'd miss at a higher dpi. I also use a lot of programs that are not DPI aware (especially older programs, but several new programs do that too) and in any hidpi monitor they look either blurry (from compositor scaling - i should also add that i dislike compositors here and disable them/do not run them when i can, but that is another topic) or everything is tiny.

> so I'm guessing you've probably never used a high resolution screen and just don't know what you're missing

I have used a high resolution screen at my previous work, specifically a 4K monitor which was around 30". It wasn't on my own computer but i got to use it a bit and wasn't a bit fan of it - yes, the image was crisp when it was running in full resolution but that was the only positive you could say. Every 3D program was very slow and most GUI programs had issues and glitches, so we almost always ran it at half resolution (which made everything blurry).

> Or are there many people out there who think like this?

I don't really know, i do not tend to act out of what everyone else is doing - at least not intentionally :-P. A friend of mine also has a 27" 1080p monitor and he has told me that the two main reasons are that he likes "looking at the pixels" and that he gets better performance in games with it.

FWIW i also have a 1440p 27" monitor (and supposedly a good one, Dell U2713HM), but it sits in the corner collecting dust (until the end of the month when i'll send it to a relative who wanted it) for a couple of years now, so it isn't like i do not have the option for higher resolution - i just do not like it.

I don't know what you suggest we do about that. I want my users to be able to use my programs in their languages, that requires translatable strings, UNICODE, IME. We didn't lose anything: I still could've used Allegro. I wouldn't because it no longer meets my needs. If you want to develop applications that don't meet modern expectations, you can use whatever framework makes you happy. Hell, some people really do still use primitive UI toolkits.

I do not suggest anything, my post was to explain that you (that is a "royal you") do not always need all the features you wrote. For example you write that you want your users to use your programs in their language, but most often that does not require Unicode - people did it before Unicode was a thing. It is just that Unicode makes it easier.

My post was an example of someone who doesn't need any of the stuff you mentioned and from my perspective these are just adding bloat since i wont use them. This isn't a recommendation or anything like that.

If you consider people being able to use your programs in their language and consider it a good thing to do, a toolkit that provides that feature will do fine for your case.

I am incredible happy that Unicode is the de facto standard and that encoding problems are (mostly) a thing from the past. But sometimes it doesn't work out and you still hve these problems (Microsoft I am looking at you and your bad Unicode CSV support in Excel).

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