Oh man, this post is so wrong. It's just like saying all people should look exactly the same in order to avoid confusion.
Yes, bootstrap is a good thing. But it should be used only as a base for further improvements.
Yes, bootstrap is a good thing. But it should be used only as a base for further improvements.
Take a look at Mac programs, for example. For the most part, they all have menus, windows, and title bars that look the same. But the important parts of many apps are unique. This makes things easier for both developers and users.
Imagine, as a developer, having to code the entire UI from scratch every time. That's how it used to be. It's not so nice for users when every app looks similar but it subtly different. It means every app has a steeper learning curve.
I think there is room for both uniformity and creativity to co-exist.
This is what change looks like. Every generation of programmers wants to hold it back. It's not fair that you've invested all this in learning how the current layer works, well now it's not current anymore. You have to adapt, or you end up obsolete.
Younger developers always say this to the old developers. It's a bit disturbing when you hear it for the first time, about you. :-)
An OS UI is mostly buttons and other widgets, window frames, and behavior. The actual applications are very different.
Just to give you an example:
Look Reeder app, Chrome, Things, iPhoto all for OSX. They are wrapped with the a common UI, but they are much different from each other.
Sure they use lots of the same OS widgets, window frame,etc.. but they have their own design and way behaviors inside.
With frameworks like twitter you can't get that, unless you hack the source. But that defeats the whole point of it in the first place.
Not for long.
> An OS UI is mostly buttons and other widgets, window frames, and behavior. The actual applications are very different.
So is Bootstrap.
> So is Bootstrap.
While that's true, it's a bit disingenuous given the difference between web development and native client development.
Not using Bootstrap doesn't mean that you need to write your own functionality from scratch; for elements like buttons all Bootstrap gives you is some nice CSS styles and a little bit of syntactic sugar over using the web browser's built-in implementation. There's a bit more of an argument for the JS plugins (tooltips, modals, etc), but even then the alternative is grabbing one of the countless other JS plugins that do the exact same thing, not necessarily rolling your own.
And there is a myriad of bootstrap-based websites now that look exactly the same.