Hacker News Reader

Comment by flowerlad | Hacker News Reader

>> OSes and frameworks have tried to solve this a bazillion ways.

What is different today is that Windows 10 and other popular platforms adopted Flat UI. Users no longer expect apps to have “native look & feel” because Flat UI has no recognizable or desirable look & feel. This is a big mistake by Microsoft because there is no longer any reason for independent developers to write native Windows apps. This works to the benefit of Electron and also users of non-Windows platforms.

View on HN

Microsoft has made it pretty clear since about Windows 10 that they don't actually care about the Desktop anymore. It certainly isn't anywhere near their biggest money-maker.

Indeed, that is why Microsoft has created teams to support React Native for macOS and Windows, on Windows case it makes use of UWP, which new roadmap (WinUI 3.0) was announced at BUILD 2019, with more details to come up on Ignite.

Yeah, Microsoft bashing never grows old.

Yeah ok, fair point. Someone at Microsoft cares a bit about Windows, just not anybody working on the UX bits.

Given the market size of laptops, 2-1 hybrids and graphical workstations running Windows, the UI/UX toolings that are available, I fail to see what you mean.

I mean the experience of using Windows has dramatically declined in the past 5 years. Forced Windows updates was a terrible idea, updates break things much more often, the start menu has ads in it by default, start menu search does strange things, it's possible to break the start menu, if you unpin an application from the task bar while it has running instances and then re-pin it you'll sometimes end up with multiple icons, the new settings panels are slower and less capable than the old ones...

Which just goes to show you how ridiculous the demand for "native look and feel" is. Of course no non technical person has ever demanded such a thing. It's like caring about the tech stack. No one cares but developers.

I don't think that is even a worry for microsoft. Its looking like MS is going to make blazor on electron and eventually blazor on native their cross platform UI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com