The State of the GUI

Adam Wilson flyboynw at gmail.com
Thu Oct 25 08:06:32 UTC 2018


On 10/24/18 7:45 PM, dayllenger wrote:
> On Thursday, 25 October 2018 at 01:39:20 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> 
>> However, if I design an app that looks the same and functions the same 
>> across platforms (mobile, web, desktop) then the brain develops 
>> shortcuts for things like button color, menu ordering, etc.
> 
> What if someone makes an application only for one platform, or only for 
> desktop or mobile? Or someone needs to quickly create a simple utility 
> and assumes that there is a good default theme - native, which looks and 
> behaves similarly as in that whole platform, utilizing "mental 
> shortcuts" of that environment.
> 

Then it is almost entirely up to what you are quickest with. Personally 
I can knock together a UI in WPF about 3x faster than I can in WinForms. 
If you know that you are only going to be supporting one platform (as is 
often the case for internal biz apps) go ahead and use whatever allows 
you to get it out quickly, because you aren't trying to cater to the 
masses.

More generally, I think there is this stubborn misconception out there 
that just because the toolkit is non-native that it is unable and 
unwilling to display the system theme. This could not be further from 
the truth. By default WPF display whichever theme that you happen to be 
using, even custom ones (it hooks the System color palette). So to use 
the native theme in WPF you have to do ... nothing. It's only when you 
want to use a custom theme that you need to do styling work.

In the case of UX/UI toolkits, I would strongly argue that the more the 
toolkit can do, the more people can use it, the more adoption it will 
see. Every time you remove functionality, you remove people who can use 
it. This is why I think that native toolkits are in the process 
relegated to in-house tools and maintenance of pre-non-native toolkit 
apps. You can never expand your market-share by focusing on a shrinking 
market. And there are two ways a market segment can shrink (absolute). 
It can get smaller itself (absolute), or it can just not grow while the 
overall market expands (relative). I think native toolkits are shrinking 
relative to the overall market. But either way, never chase the 
shrinking market. Especially when the tool that supports the growing 
market is a superset of the shrinking tool.

There is absolutely no reason that a D based non-native toolkit could 
not be used to mimic the native theme at a pixel level. WPF does it, so 
we *know* it can be done. Easy, no. Possible, absolutely. :)

-- 
Adam Wilson
IRC: EllipticBit
import quiet.dlang.dev;


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