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Comment by zaat | Hacker News Reader

I'll be really happy if UWP will die. I don't care for the visual side it offers at all, and the UX is simply terrible compared to the good old Win32.

Maybe I'm missing something, but the feeling I got regarding UWP is that it is an effort to unify the UX across all platforms and devices by aiming to lowest common denominator of all platforms. It meant that simple and useful utility like calc became a visually bloated app with sluggish UX. It meant every app takes double the screen size and offers half the functionality. In short, it made useful computer programs into passable mobile apps.

Isn't it obvious that mobile apps UI/UX is poor and is only acceptable as a compromise due to form factor limitations?

Did the strategy folks at Microsoft thought sacrificing the desktop will get them the mobile?

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It meant that simple and useful utility like calc became a visually bloated app with sluggish UX.

That's an excellent example. A calculator does not need a loading screen, nor should it take over a second to start on any remotely modern machine. Fortunately MS have released the source, so you can see for yourself just how much bloat there is:

https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator

To compare, you can also see the source of the old "classic" calculator from Windows 2000 here:

https://github.com/pustladi/Windows-2000/tree/661d000d50637e...

That said, Windows CE was an attempt "to unify the UX", being basically a subset of Win32, and that didn't cause anywhere near the same level of disgust, so I'd attribute the bloat more to the cruft of "modern practices" than anything else.

If you look at the history of Microsoft across platforms, with the exception of the Xbox they've been pushing the unified paradigm for decades. It's one of the things that really set the iPad apart at release- a tablet that didn't try to re-use the desktop paradigm, as opposed to the parade of previously failed Microsoft tablet attempts. UWP was simply an attempt to do the same thing from the opposite direction, with the same poor result. It seems to be lesson that's been very hard for them to learn.

This comment is spot on. UWP apps feel gratuitously non-native on Windows, have terrible keyboard accessibility, and exhibit a ton of interoperability issues with third-party utilities like xkeymacs that hook into platform functionality. Even Electron apps that use standard buttons and text inputs end up feeling more native.

The lack of good keyboard accessibility is particularly frustrating, because the ribbon paradigm and even the menu accelerators in old-school Win32 apps both had outstanding, highly discoverable keyboard control.

> Isn't it obvious that mobile apps UI/UX is poor...

Isn't this the direction that MacOS is going too? I hear complaints of "iOS apps" becoming default on macOS too.

That will probably be fine for the 90% of Mac users who came from iOS anyway.

Microsoft figured out that the only way to scale mobile apps up across platforms is to dumb the apps down.

That’s an artifact of dealing with the real estate challenges on the phone and the side effect of this era where apps need to hustle users for marginal dollars first and do something useful second. That said, they failed on mobile, and the tablets are more like laptops than iPads. And the market likes that!

I think the younger developers are doing to flip to Chromebooks and Windows, as the Unix tool sets are there, and both vendors take their vision of PC seriously.

Didn't they fire the guy behind Windows 8?

Microsoft took mobile-first too literally and applied it to their entire OS

>Microsoft took mobile-first too literally

Server 2012.

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