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Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know big tech companies were still capable of making GUI's that look like this.

You mean a UI in which all the clickable elements are obvious, features are discoverable, it’s fairly obvious what you’re interacting with, and keyboard navigation works well? I didn’t know big tech companies could still do this either.

In my opinion, this looks far better and more usable than a lot of new UIs nowadays.

I’d say appearance != usability, and while this might look a bit dated, it probably behaves a lot more like a desktop application than most Electron apps out there.

Indeed, that GUI is awesome.

To me it looks very much like mRemoteNG (https://mremoteng.org/). Is this just because the same WinForms libraries were used or is there some meat to this?

It looks like it's just the same WinForms - they don't seem to share any code.

In my mind that keyboard navigable tree widget is the one redeeming feature of windows. I guess the age of “keyboard first” is long gone :(

Nowadays I'm happy if it even bothers to register all keystrokes. Somehow this has become more difficult now that CPUs are many times faster and don't need to queue all keystrokes to ensure they are taken care of eventually.

Except for tab always being backwards for me. It goes up...

It looks really useful!

It's gorgeous. Like a breath of fresh air after all that electron nightmare.

I don't see the correlation. I get that people don't like electron bloat, but that is orthogonal to UI/UX, no?

The issue with Electron is that devs tries to mimic the browsers UI in a desktop environment. Our desktop OS need to have a desktop UI instead of the mobile webpage with Material/Flat UI design (no visual box line, no separators, no multi-windows, pushing the setting menu as a sidebar, etc). It should be treated as a desktop app with the benefits of desktop, not a mobile app which is the issue.

It looks like this because it's C# and probably using standard UI frameworks instead of hot new buzzword tech or Electron.

it's .net framework 4.X and I really do wonder why...

I can't tell if you think it's a good thing or not. I'm personally impressed; I bet it hardly uses any memory!

you mean: one that is simple, works, represents the underlying model with a tree, and runs on a desktop?

It’s based on visual studio.

It's not. It's using WinForms with the DockPanel Suite library, with a VS2015 theme.

It's not. This is a regular .NET Windows Forms app and the docking/tabbing stuff is DockPanelSuite, I'd recognize it a mile away. This is confirmed by poking around in their .csproj.

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