Comment by boogies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boogies | Hacker News Reader

Source-available variants of [GNU's Not] Unix have often been on the leading edge of user interfaces, from immitating the Xerox PARC desktop metaphor before Windows did (X11 initial release: June 1984, Windows: November 1985) to adding intrusive ads to the main system menu / search around the time Windows 8 was released. But it’s interesting to see macOS’s proprietary UI now apparently following GNOME’s example of powering “native” interfaces with JavaScript.

Edit: apparently this is actually more similar to Windows, which also uses React for system settings. All this DE stuff is too complicated for a simple person like me (I just use dwm on desktop and mobile).

> [...] following GNOME’s example of powering “native” interfaces with JavaScript.

Isn't this javascript but without web tech? That doesn't really stray too far from native anyways.

Windows 98 predated both of these, i.e.

> to adding intrusive ads to the main system menu / search around the time Windows 8 was released

...active desktop's channels[0] were basically ads in your desktop

> GNOME’s example of powering “native” interfaces with JavaScript

...HTML Applications, ActiveScripting (with the JScript backend) and an embeddable MSHTML/IE engine enabled both JavaScript and "web views" in applications (in Visual Basic 4 or later all you had to do was to use the web control to get instant HTML rendering capabilities).

With "active desktop" you could even use an HTML or web page as your background, e.g. back then i had a hacker-ish background with scrolling assembly code at the side (the scrolling was done via javascript) ala Terminator - though i disabled it after some days since it was using pretty much all of my CPU :-P

[0] https://i.imgur.com/9AqdbdM.gif

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application

Windows settings use react native

Sadly, at least it uses WinUI/UWP underneath.

Apple has been doing that for ages, see e.g. the iTunes music store or Apple Music.

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