Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

dleslie

I prefer native widgets to whatever application-enforced fad of the year is current.

Apps are lauded for providing "dark mode" now; when ten years ago I simply switched GTK themes.

To say nothing of accessibility.

We've gone way backwards in UX.

View on HN

To be fair, dark GTK themes don't really work. I say this as someone who uses dark GTK themes. Far too many applications end up with dark text on a dark background, and Firefox applies your theme colors to websites so websites also end up with dark text on dark backgrounds. At least a dark mode created by the application's authors usually works.

Firefox is a special case of stupid as far as themeing. Fortunately it's possible to both make Firefox's ui dark with css and make Firefox use a light gtk theme for websites with an env variable which is the logical choice.

This has been a problem since forever. Even on Windows 95 it was like that. Probably before that. Windows does have special values for system colors, like text, window background, text background etc. But for some reason, a lot of programs ended up setting the text color explicitly to black and leaving everything else at the system colors. So you better left the color scheme at default. Which is probably fine for the average user, but there were these high contrast schemes which were white on black. People who actually had to rely on this must have had a bad time. Just how these schemes also increased the font size. Doing that, or increasing the system's dpi setting guaranteed that all text in every application would be truncated.

Absolutely. Developers can pick from many native-widget frameworks in pretty much any language, heck I bet there are even Qt bindings for node. But there are just so many people doing web development, it's probably a hiring/design issue in that hiring web developers and designers is just so much easier than hiring whatever people know the GUI framework that's driving much of the code.

There's also the fact that the UI tools for web development are mostly way easier to use than Gtk or Qt.

Even "simple" stuff like Tcl/Tk is not trivial to get working easily or well.

HTML + CSS + something like React is miles simpler than writing something for Gtk. Qt has QML now but the C++ Qt bindings are _pretty hard_! And after all that work you don't (by default) get an app that resizes as nicely as the HTML/CSS box model does!

I think that WxWidgets has one of the better usability stories for cross-platform native, though.

If someone wrote a good feeling UI library that generated native UIs and had good JS and Python bindings, so many people would be happy to use it, I think. But right now, despite all the shortcomings, web tech is pretty easy to prototype in.

This is an important point. Being easier to create means faster to market, faster to create new features, easier cross platform, more value for users in less time. Not all apps can be web based but for those that can be, faster dev time has become a competitive requirement.

have you tried using OneNote in dark mode, it actually feels dark, like you can't see anything

Reply on news.ycombinator.com