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> that has nothing to do with React and Electron

Not only that, but I think that Electron leads to the opposite problem: all apps look and behave differently, they don't follow platform guidelines, they look out of place.

> they don't follow platform guidelines

Do platforms even follow their own guidelines? And if they do, are those guidelines good? Microsoft doesn't seem to care about UI/UX at all, Apple's UI/UX quality gets worse each year, and Linux is all over the place with each distro doing its own thing. What guidelines are those apps supposed to follow?

Looking at the current state of things, I think it's good that apps tend to do whatever they think is best for their use case. Also, most people don't switch between 100 different apps all the time.

I never had a problem with that. I want a specific application to behave the same no matter where I run it. I do not want my muscle memory for how to use an application to be confused by an application not looking or behaving the way I am used to when moving to a different platform.

Of course all the applications bundled with a specific OS should be designed to work the same and work well together. It still makes sense to have guidelines and standard widgets in a system. But I prefer very much any third-party multi-platform app to be identical everywhere I run it.

Not to defend Electron. There are many native frameworks that work the way I prefer, looking the same across platforms.

I use probably 70% Windows, 20% iPad, 5% Meta Quest 3 [1], and 5% MacOS -- for the latter though it is mostly "test that something works on MacOS" and "tech support for the computer the family uses".

I like web-based applications that behave the same everywhere. Personally I feel the MacOS widget set is a touch old fashioned, a little ugly and gauche. I can see though why somebody might like the MacOS terminal better than CMD.EXE. The dominant theme on Windows is that Windows has several widget sets that aren't consistent but the average user doesn't notice or care -- probably the worst area is the settings dialogs which seem to be mostly migrated to a Metro-based design lately. I was afraid before they wouldn't finish that migration before they churned to another framework but I think they've stopped the churn.

The best windows applications, in my mind, steal from web technology -- like they are either using some kind of HTML-based UI or they are made by people who grew up making web applications and reproduce those patterns w/ the desktop widget sets.

[1] I've got some web applications I wrote that run perfectly on the MQ3, especially after I got target sizes up to WCAG AAA level and it is fun to put the headset on and crash out on the couch and get things done

> I've got some web applications I wrote that run perfectly on the MQ3, especially after I got target sizes up to WCAG AAA level and it is fun to put the headset on and crash out on the couch and get things done

One way to have better text in VR for 2D content is to make use of OpenXR composition layers:

https://developers.meta.com/horizon/documentation/unreal/os-...

Don't worry, not Unreal specific. Hope it helps you out!

Web applications are the reason personal computers are a failure today.

> But I prefer very much any third-party multi-platform app to be identical everywhere I run it.

Apps that disregard platform standard behaviors are poorly-written apps. Whether they happen to be cross-platform or not is irrelevant.

I hate applications that don’t feel native to their OS, and the common solutions for looking the same across platforms (Java and Electron) fail at being good on every platform. Their attempts to replicate native functionality results in Java applications that can’t reliably resize columns or sort tables or accept focus when a dialog is open or a dozen other annoying failures I’ve seen, while looking they were imported from a failed OS that never succeeded for good reason. Electron results (and Microsoft’s work alike) results in slow bloated applications that can’t handle focus either, or flip from screen to screen properly, or even be discoverable because there controls aren’t anything real native applications use.

> they don't follow platform guidelines

I don't think platform guidelines that anyone listens to have been a real thing for a long time. Even between apps released by MS there is little or no consistency at times, things that should be part of standard OS provided chrome like title-bars are a random mess - good luck guessing what has input focus sometimes, particularly with multiple monitors, as you unlock or switch vdesktop, without clicking to make sure.

I keep thinking of writing something that detects the top-most app window and draws an obvious box around it.

Native macOS developers respected Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for a long time, but even that's declining now that everyone needs to work around all the problems with Liquid Glass.

Yes, Liquid Glass is atrocious and it's the reason why I'm not going to buy a new Mac.

>> I keep thinking of writing something that detects the top-most app window and draws an obvious box around it.

I would use this in a heartbeat. With Windows 10/11 I usually have the option to apply a garish accent color to the active window active. Nowadays, more and more apps don't use native window frames anymore, so that option works less and less.

The W11 task bar with its barely legible indicators doesn't help either.

On a big ultra-wide display with a few windows open, I sometimes struggle to see which one is active.

> > I keep thinking of writing something that detects the top-most app window and draws an obvious box around it.

> I would use this in a heartbeat.

I may one day get around to it. Of the many projects on my “will probably never actually happen” list¹ it is one of the smallest. I did something similar to add other decorations to windows back in my just-post-Uni days². Walking the process list, getting the hWnd(s) you were interested in, and for there the window dimensions, was fairly trivial and it no doubt still is.

----

[1] I mention them here where relevant, in the hopes that someone else will see the ideas and be inspired to implement the them in an open form so I don't have to :-)

[2] ~win2000 era, I was playing in Delphi at the time

> Yeah, weird-shaped windows are definitely not something that should make a comeback. Just because you could doesn't mean you should.

My opinion here is the exact opposite of yours. Make computers cool again! They used to look like an alien spaceship, now everything looks like paperwork.

We can make it cool again! We can make it fun.

All the fun parts of life are optional.

I'm with you. It's fine if your opinion is "software = tool" and you personally want it to be utilitarian and basic, but plenty of us desire our software interfaces to have personality and customization. The answer is that we should have the option to choose.

I use computers for a plenty of fun, but those programs always were the digital equivalent of garden gnomes. Utterly kitschy. Just having a basic sense of aesthetics doesn't imply thinking that computers should be dull or just for work.

Accessibility is really important as well, as there's different laws and regulations covering people's rights here too. Modern cross-platform GUI frameworks (as heavy as they can be) have no issues supporting screen readers and HiDPI for people with sight difficulties.

I don't know. They look cool. If someone wants to bring them back it's a viable option. I'd definitely welcome it.

Agreed. I remember seeing quite a few non-standard designs in the days of Vista, especially when Microsoft was heavily promoting the Windows Presentation Foundation framework and using XAML for UI design.

The problem with setups like this is that the moment you need to resize them, place them in a specific spot, or move them to a larger or smaller monitor, they tend to scale terribly and end up causing all kinds of “death by a thousand cuts” issues.

Quite. And the era when everyone was trying to "do their own thing" with UI design wasn't exactly pleasant or usable. Just have a look at some of these designs, for example

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/mshame.htm

Ahh, but I do miss all the weird phones from 1998 - 2008.

I think it's ultimately the same process at work.

It would help if you had seething more specific to say about usability rather than blindly defending the bland conformity: for example, if your music player app looks like your physical old round CD music player, not a rectangle, how exactly does it hurt usability?

> Applications that implement their own widgets or color schemes or nonstandard shapes usually pay zero attention to usability or accessibility.

OS are close to this, pick any era of the constantly changing OS color schemes and widget design, and you'll find plenty of issues, with the basics of the basics - readability - suffering.

So again, why should everyone be generically bad just because they wrote the "guidelines"? Sure, change doesn't mean good, but the neither does using the defaults

There's a wave of "desktop games" on Steam. Most of them are Idle genre or tamagochi like.

For those I find these exoctic shaped windows are fun and a great differentiator.

Example:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2666510/Rustys_Retirement...

Bundle with a ton of these games:

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/48558/BottomOfYourScre...

You're thinking of apps for work. There's no reason why people should not be able to have fun when not working

Am I? Why would you assume that? Do you think that usability and accessibility are only important for work?

Not to mention that the statement is wrong. Windows applications do NOT look the same, and that's bad.

Oh... except for their lack of a title bar, which prevents you from telling which application you're looking at. Is this PDF open in Edge, or Acrobat? Who knows. The windows look the same.

Beyond that... it's a disgraceful mess. You have applications now with no menu bar, but instead a bunch of hamburger buttons and "gear" buttons scattered all over the place. And common, standard functions like "save file" are further hidden behind "more" labels even in THOSE menus.

Another example of Windows's galling regression: the abolition of the File dialog in many apps, which have replaced it with a giant page of crudely-drawn, unlabeled, super-wide text boxes and a bunch of plain text. There's no file structure shown, so you have no idea where you are about to save a file... It's truly a clinic on dogshit UI. Pathetic.

Companies like IBM and Microsoft did a lot of HCI research back in the 80s, and made a lot of progress with usability and common idioms that all software followed. Then when displays with 256 or more colors became common, all that went out the window.

All those Windows Media Player skins were awful because they used so much screen real estate on dead space. Whereas the plethora of Winamp skins kept the economy of screen real estate while still providing unique and imaginative visuals.

The whole skeuomorphic trend starting in the mid-90s was similarly awful for the same reason. First, it was often hard to tell what was a control and what was just decoration. Second, it often took trial and error to figure out what was what. And, as I mentioned above, these designs almost inevitably wasted huge chunks of screen space on decoration that provided no functionality.

Of course, we have the opposite problem now. All windows look the same. Title bars are mostly gone. And since companies like Microsoft replaced all their HCI experts with art-school dropouts who think the "flat" look with low contrast is cool, not only can you not tell what app you're looking at. Half the time you can't even tell where one window stops and another starts.

The only good UI thing that's come out of the last decade or two is a near universal support for "dark mode". Otherwise, I would greatly prefer the Windows 2000 "classic" look, or something similar.

I agree with your sentiments, but not your timeline. The mid-'90s was the high point for GUIs, with Windows 95 nailing it pretty much across the board.

And as you note, "flat" design is NO design. It's total dereliction of the design task. Fortunately we're seeing some steps back toward legitimate GUI, where controls are occasionally demarcated as controls.

A great example of Windows's pathetic regression is "dark mode." Since the early '90s (and I mean '91 or '92), you could set up a system-wide color scheme. Inverse color schemes were an unfortunate vestige of the late '80s, early '90s... the advent of the Mac, "desktop publishing," and the effort to make the screen an analog for a piece of paper. That analogy fails.

The result was millions of people reading black text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day, every day. The first thing I did was set up a charcoal theme in Windows, pretty much exactly what all the "dark" schemes are today. And all properly written applications inherited it and all was good.

So... just in time for people to realize that this was the way, Microsoft REMOVED the color-scheme editor from windows. Only to have to hastily slap a hard-coded "dark mode" back onto the OS. So damned stupid.

> The whole skeuomorphic trend starting in the mid-90s was similarly awful for the same reason. First, it was often hard to tell what was a control and what was just decoration. Second, it often took trial and error to figure out what was what.

I strongly disagree - do you often find it hard to figure out where the light switch is when you enter a room? Terrible applications are terrible regardless of whether they are modern or old, whether skeuomorphic or purely functional. But well written applications tend to have more affordance when skeuomorphic because people already know a lot about real world controls and their function.

I'd rather weird windows everywhere than material design everywhere.

Adobe is a notable holdout in refusing to go native.