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Comment by ktosobcy | Hacker News Reader

> The menu bar was in the same place in every application. Short-cuts were consistent between apps.

Thank the "web-devs"... instead of having native looking apps that use OS controls/widgets they want to push dumb html/css/js to "unlease their creativity"... I'm sorry but huge middle finger to you.

I want all my apps to use the same widgets and paradigme and look the same...

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Exactly! Let's go back to the times when things were consistent! Remember when you couldn't tell AIM from ICQ from MSN Messenger from Skype because they looked and behaved consistently?

Just find an old Windows VM and put Winamp next to Sonique next to RealPlayer next to Windows Media Player next to QuickTime -- those sure were the days, until the damn "creatives" came with their stupid "web tech."

I think they were referring to internal consistency?

Windows XP did allow apps to do some crazy things, though not sure how much of that was unique to XP vs legacy APIs.

"Layered Windows" is how an application can have a window which is not the typical rectangular shape, such as the "Head" skin for Windows Media Player. That would be the "crazy things" that apps were allowed to do.

That's just a mask applied to the window, app were always allowed to do that on Windows and still are.

Exactly! We spent years training reflexes and keyboard shortcuts, only to have window borders change appearance (and get thinner!), menus rearrange, controls vanish unless moused-over, etc. It's an insult.

I try not to think about the collective time and frustration lost to companies wanting their native apps to be "on brand" and cross-platform consistent rather than native. A bunch of extra work to make it that way. A bunch of extra work to maintain it, any place dumb "look and feel" shit like specially-animated buttons or whatever made it fragile. Then on the other side, 99% of the time it's worse to use than if they'd at least mostly stuck with native widgets, so wastes time and causes frustration among users, and then there's the special case of that for accessibility, which is often a true shit-show.

All because the marketing suite can't stand not getting their fingers in something. I want to see the fucking study that says having the buttons on iOS the same shape as the ones on the website adds any number of dollars to the bottom line. C'mon, this is important enough to spend a bunch of money on, slow development, and also make UX worse, must have a good reason for it, right? Surely it's not just an exec who's never done the actual job pushing things for vanity purposes, or a variety of roles padding their portfolios, or needing to market this to toddler-like C-suiters inside the company on some damn powerpoint, right? LOL.

It’s all such a waste of human life time, an actual tragedy.

I connect this in my head to a shift in presentation of things like big box stores, which look a lot more consistent and marketing-designed these days than they did in, say, the '90s. Hell, fast food chains, too. It's like some time in the '00s marketing departments across the board received a much greater mandate and I've got this funny feeling that only some of that, and maybe not most of it, is really justified by added value in dollar terms.

But then, for as much as we pretend to be data-driven in business and pay lip service to various science-adjacent notions and think we've really got it all figured out, mooooost of it falls apart if you poke at it a little and it all starts to look very fad and social-proof driven. So I guess just add this to the list of weird stuff companies do for maybe-bad reasons.

I feel the same way, I feel despair when I think about all of the time wasted for such trivial bullshit. But then I'm told I'm being dramatic and to get back to my Jira stories. Line must go up, huh?

While I do think native controls are the better choice, I disagree that companies even though it's harder. They do it mostly because it's easier: write once in JS, push to web, mobile and electron on desktop and be done with it.

Yeah but look how _cool_ those css effects look. What, people actually use keyboards to navigate?

> I'm sorry but huge middle finger to you.

Amen.

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