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