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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

It's not whether Windows is aesthetically pleasing. It's that it's 2016 and some first-party windows apps still upscale fonts rendered at half resolution. It's that there are two control panels. That kind of messiness is endemic to the platform.

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I don't agree with the notion of blaming the platform because some devs refuse to update to modern standards of the platform. That's on the devs.

First party, as in, provided by Microsoft.

I just ran Win10 for the first time yesterday to work on a security guideline and I was blown away by how janky the whole thing was. Using it is like crawling through 20 years of computer history; there's things from every phase of Windows since '95 in that UI, and I don't mean UI hints, but entire applications.

I bet somewhere in there there's still UI that dates back to Win3.1.

Well, I think it is quite possible that the devs on the first-party team are not the same devs on the platform team. First-party or not, if the platform provides the tools and the devs refuse to use them, it is on the devs. Not the platform, the devs. Unless you can show me where the company demands its devs do so for no good reason.

>> I bet somewhere in there there's still UI that dates back to Win3.1.

I'm sure there is, that's a mix of backwards compatibility and don't mess with stuff that works. Some people want it, some people don't; can't make everybody happy. Can I complain that OS X provides a terminal that looks like it dates back to the 70's?

No? Because that complaint doesn't make any sense? Especially since Terminal.app is far more modern than CMD.EXE?

> Especially since Terminal.app is far more modern than CMD.EXE?

To be fair, a lot of Terminal.app dates back to ancient Mac OS too. The menu bars, for example, are all still Carbon. There is still a full classic Mac OS main loop running alongside the Cocoa main loop in every macOS application. Apple's done a good job hiding it, but it's still there.

Anyway, cmd.exe is a bit of a special case. What you're really seeing is conhost.exe, which is kept the way it is because it's part of CSRSS, which occupies a similar place as PID 1 does, and Microsoft doesn't want to bring new UI into it for fear of increasing its dependencies [1].

[1]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071231-00/?p=...

It does makes sense if I insist we only consider my own personal subjective opinion on the matter, which most complaints along these lines tend to be.

The 3.1 UI that still exists is silly stuff like file open dialogs that aren't "desktop aware" or whatever. There's no reason at all to retain such "compat" because it instead requires users to learn where all such magic folders live in the filesystem.

I'm with you there. Windows 10 looks like developers designed it. Not meant to come off negatively to developers but sometimes we just get lazy and use solid colors.

Windows is beautiful compared to the Mac OS where the software all looks like it was inspired by a 1970's era stereo unit.

The ugly UI isn't even the worst part about the Mac OS though. The worst part is that it just doesn't even come close to offering the same sort of freedom that you get on Windows where Microsoft leaves hooks in to let developers actually do what they want.

Most of the problems with the Mac OS are by design too. I think it's hilarious that Apple folks think it's a really good idea to hide the label on most buttons. I guess you have to "just know what it is" before clicking it or hover over it and hope for a tooltip to popup tell you what the thing will do. Real efficient.

There's really no wonder in my mind why most people don't use Apple anything.

I have to agree despite your downvotes. From 8.1 onwards, mobile and desktop, Windows has been the most beautiful OS. Using my iPhone 7 feels like stepping back in time in terms of the visuals.

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