Hacker News Reader

Comment by k00pa | Hacker News Reader

Adding HTML to the GUI coding is re-inveting the wheel. There are native toolkits for UI, there are crossplatform UI libraries for a reason. They work, they are fast.

No need to add extra layers on top of those.

View on HN

Most desktop applications have a terrible interface compared to modern websites. That wouldn't be the case if the UI libraries were half as good as some people here claim.

Most new desktop applications have a really crappy interface. Mostly because they are trying to copy some new homepage layout and instead is missing lots of information and buttons and fading in/out text and buttons instead of letting me click them directly. Not to mention taking several seconds to load a form that on my 8MHz Atari would have loaded instantly. Yes I'm old, get off my lawn!

Desktop apps from the late 1980s to around 2004 or so were very usable. There were clear UI standards in place for most platforms, and thus a high degree of consistency between applications, even from different vendors.

Even Java's AWT, which came at the tail end of this and pretty much only targeted UI functionality that was common between different UI systems, could create desktop apps that were and are much more usable than the inconsistent web-inspired desktop apps we deal with today.

Let me add myself to the chorus of people standing up for native desktop applications. Sure, there are bad and good examples of both desktop and web UIs. But whats so horrendous about the original Mac OS interface? What was so bad about Gnome 2?

Firefox's UI is already built using XUL markup, which is rendered using the rendering engine.

In case of Firefox, it works. Its single app that runs the UI in a XML based markup thing.

Issue comes when the whole operating system would be run on top of some XML thing...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com