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Comment by phtrivier | Hacker News Reader

The curious thing about "native" GUIs, nowadays, is that most people spend their time using "desktop" apps that are just browsers in disguise, and don't really bother with looking like any platform's native UI.

I often wonder how much effort it would take to make one of the popular eguis framework and, rather than make it looks "like a native" app, you could get away with making it look "like a browser". (everyone style buttons/ inputs / etc... but they have a general "default" feeling that people are probably used to, at this point ?)

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I also wonder if it's not mostly developers that care about that, as long as the software is well made and fast I think users will use it without thinking twice about it. For example Blender's GUI has nothing native yet it's massively used, some people complain about the complexity of the UI but rarely if ever of the non native look.

Yep,as a former animator-in-training and heavy Blender user, the fact that the UI didn't match the rest of the OS was an afterthought, at best. You might even argue that having the exact same UI look on multiple OSs was a plus.

> The curious thing about "native" GUIs, nowadays, is that most people spend their time using "desktop" apps that are just browsers in disguise,

I really feel like I live in some alternate universe sometimes. Most people around me use very classic desktop apps for their day-to-day work - blender, kicad, adobe illustrator, qt creator, telegram desktop, krita, ableton live, libreoffice ... none of these are browsers in disguise.

Most of those don't look particularly "native" either. Apps like Blender and Krita look like themselves and not like any OS desktop widget system.

I’d say just make it look decent for an amateur app.

Skinning at least close to native (colors, fonts) should be good enough.

I remember using both Swing and Tk apps on Windows that attempted to replicate a Windows look-and-feel and did not quite succeed, and the uncanny valley effect was strong with those; similarly with Qt apps attempting to emulate the active Gtk+ 2 theme. So being close to native might even be a bit worse than nothing like native.

(Not that it’s impossible to do a near-perfect emulation—IE 5&6, VB 6, and Office 97 all use completely custom widget toolkits, and apart from the funky menus and common file dialogs in Office people rarely complained about mismatches with the platform.)

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