Windows 11: a survey of text boxes

You get some updated Win32 window classes, theme engine updated for the UWP based stuff (or WinUI if on desktop side) and that's it.

I hope not --- frankly speaking, this new stuff is horrible.

Compare how long the original Control Panel takes to open with the new "Settings App". Then compare their visual complexity. The latter takes multiple seconds to open, even has a loading screen, and yet all the controls in it are incredibly bland and featureless and conceptually simpler to render than in the old one. This is none other than a huge regression.

We discover this information like everyone else, conference talks, blog posts, books and developer documentation.

Guess what, I am 100% sure they do the basic for Win32, make some efforts for WinUI 2.0 (UWP) and WinUI 3.0 (the Win32 one) and that's it.

Just looking at Explorer:

- The window itself is a regular Win32 window

- It hosts a WinUI island or such for the top toolbar

- The navigation bar is a ReBar with all custom Win32 widgets

- The content view is a DirectUI widget

You'd think that if they'd standardise on a single toolkit (like macOS with Cocoa) they'd be able to get better results with much less work. Perhaps this is an organisational issue?

Windows happens to have such legacy support and lack of product direction that’s it’s now layers and layers or turds.

This just reveals Microsoft’s prioritization of UX consistency. Whatever the priority is, it’s not enough to overcome the perceived cost of creating consistency.

It also shows why Windows can be a strength: still runs almost everything anyone ever made for it.

In some cases, APIs wouldn't be too much of a hindrance, and one could replace one toolkit by a later version with updated designs. But the designs themselves also do have a lot of compatibility problems: It is uncommon in the Windows GUI world to use layout managers (similar to CSS flexboxes and the like) that automatically adapt to different window and UI element sizes. Instead, most widgets are positioned pixel-wise. That is also why most dialogs are non-resizeable and things break e.g. when translated strings have different lengths. So a new design which changes sizes breaks all the pixelwise layouts everywhere.

tl;dr: Windows GUIs and toolkits are usually not designed with compatibility and resizeability in mind and break if you change the looks of anything (beyond just changing colors).

But more modern toolkits like WPF are much closer to html in their function. A text box is a white rectangle with a cursor. If you want to add autocomplete, placeholders, a magnifying glass icon in the edge - you put it there yourself.

So basically, making a text search field in Windows now is the same as making it for a webpage. The toolkit doesn't have options for adding autocomplete, placeholder text or icons. I think this is the correct API design, because controls that could do everything would be very difficult to work with.

That said, there should have been some utility or standard library to make it easier to be consistent, such as creating a "system-standard search box" which would then simply do all the gluing that is required for adding the necessary bells and whistles.

I'm sure there is both documentation and utilitiies for doing exactly this - but the problem is that it's so hard to find because everything keeps moving. Ironically I think internal ms devs feel the same way.

You'd think having one blessed toolkit and implementing things there, once, takes much fewer resources than doing it half-heartedly over and over again.

Knowing that doesn't make it easier to use.

As for Gtk and Qt, don't throw rocks when the roof is made of thin glass.

All Gtk+ versions require major rewrites and now they even dropped Glade, with the replacement coming who knows when.

Qt, is now focusing on QML instead of C++ Widgets and also requires rewrites across versions.

2021 the year of the Linux desktop? /s

But I remind myself that in 1984, the idea of a visual interface was a little shocking to people: "What do I do? Where can I click?"

The Web kicked open the door and allowed all manner of UI designs. At the same time though, people were more comfortable navigating the breadth of UI by then.

I still prefer simplicity, consistency though.

While I agree UI consistency is dead even on MacOS now, personally I believe the Windows issue stems from them being too scared to actually push out full redesigns.

Look how vocal and angry people were when they started redesigning Settings even though most of control panel was designed for sub 800x600 resolutions.

This is why we're stuck with such inconsistency because they can never make sweeping changes without people freaking out, this is why we're stuck with things like that terrible device manager that refreshes the whole view and flickers 3 times when you plug in a USB device.

Really Windows should be pushing out a complete redesign and update of at least 2 of these apps every version. People will scream and shout every time they do but it's the only chance Windows has to completely modernize itself and get it up to par with Mac system tools and standard apps.

'Modern develpoers'? What're you talking about, first of all, HN has weird trend of speaking as if Devs are these all-powerful artisans at their org when actually there's a Product Manager and a whole design org that makes these calls, Devs at best can file a recommendation and maybe get it considered.

Secondly, Electron is a business choice to minimize time spent doing cross-platfom GUI development. Can someone give me the list of cross-platform apps from back in the day with well thought out platform-specific GUIs? Cause I swear most of the popular Windows apps I used in the early 2000s like Winamp, Foobar2000, Notepad++, Soulseek, µTorrent, were Windows-only. Everyone's not just gonna run out and learn Qt, so tired of this low-hanging fruit type comment about Electron/Web Developers ruining everything. Go talk to this thing called the market instead.

They even had to restaff Forms and WPF teams, because with UWP they were reallocated to something else.

This isn't true, almost each thing would require at least a UI rewrite to get them up to consistency or you'd just have a task of trying to hack the ten or so UI frameworks to look the same but they wouldn't act or feel the same.

I don't think it's impossible but you need a product focused exec who cares enough about it to basically demand a few of the apps or panels be rewritten each version and keep sending it back until it looks right.

Has to come from the top because a designer going around and trying to get them to rewrite say Device Manager to make it feel up to date and stop flickering isn't ever going to convince anyone.

Of course every step of the way reviewers and your own community are going to be shouting at you for changing 20 year old UIs. It'll be a thankless task until 10 years after it's done when they come to terms with the change and realize they finally have a consistent Windows.

ESPN and NPR are two examples of news sites that use containers with grey backgrounds and I think they're both really nice to read. Not some blinding amount of pure white like most news sites.