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Comment by ZoomZoomZoom | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for Win32, but those odd-shapes and custom skins were the precursors and the normalizing precedent for the current default mentality of "visual identity = branding" that's been killing desktop computing experience for years and is one of the reasons we have to endure reacts, electrons and multitude of half-baked widget libraries that consist of things looking like no particular control but all feature blurry text rendering, flaky accessibility, negative information density and their own special sets of bugs.

Unless you're building a Blender or an Ardour or, I don't know, a trading platform or a game, an individualized GUI should be the last of your priorities.

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It's different. Electron apps all look the same without actually making much efforts to make them "personal" -- they just want to release an app ASAP so they chose Electron.

On the other hand, the Win32 era "skins" like they ones used in Video Player and Winamp are very personal -- they have distinct styles. Maybe we don't like the styles, but at least they are trying to make a unique taste.

Electron apps do not have tastes. Unless you count flat design + as little UI as possible as a taste.

Modern operating systems are for servers, for corporations. They are not personal. Linux was for hackers and sysadmins then, not power users, and for servers now. Linux does make a come back for desktop because Windows team makes such a herculean effort to trash its own product. The Win 3.1 - Win XP era are the real "personal" era.

> Electron apps all look the same without actually making much efforts to make them "personal" -- they just want to release an app ASAP so they chose Electron.

Which is the most goofy thing about the whole situation! I would argue that the push for “visual identity” was largely responsible for the drive towards web apps vs. native apps in the early 00s. In exchange we got all of these tortured UI frameworks built to paper over hypertext abstractions that weren’t well suited to application development to start with. And now we use these frameworks to make bland applications again!

It's the worst of both worlds. Not only are the bland, but they don't even follow the platform's conventions, have horrible accessibility (because they no longer get it for free from the platform), and don't respect my desktop environment's theming, fonts, colors, and so on.

If I want to release a native app ASAP, I would chose .NET, Delphi, C++ Builder, Qt,...

If it has to be Web stack, it would be hosted somewhere and delivered as a proper Web application.

I think they want an app, but prefer to use web stack, so that's the result. The reason they want an app instead of a web application, is maybe an app gives them more control.

Which gives the worse of both.

Web development has been part of my life, on and off, since around 1998, and I never shipped browsers inside applications, not even during MSHTML glory days.

Either proper application, or delivered to the already installed browser.

I even refused a job offer where that was going to be part of it, some Electron like thingy.

Nowadays true native app work is very limited and many companies just use Electron. Oh well.

For your average business app, yes, I agree, however there are a lot of apps I use on my iPad that have essentially moved this "custom skin" UI into elements in a full-screen wrapper and they look and work wonderfully. There are also lots of smart devices that have hyper individualized UIs, modern cars, anything in the audio realm with a screen, plenty of examples.

But yes, you're showing a series of forms to fill out? Use the platform native controls and make it work perfectly.

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