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Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

This is the opposite of what I want. If I'm on my Mac, I don't want menus at the top of the window. I don't want an Office-style ribbon. I don't want buttons that don't look native, or UIs that don't obey the configuration I've set up at the OS level.

Each OS has its own idioms and design patterns. I don't want my experience to be more similar to what someone on Windows sees, I want it to look like the rest of the things on my computer.

Let's not pretend this is what users want. It's what developers want so they don't have to write their UI once for each platform.

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Developers are users too. If users cared enough not to use cross-platform software because it didn’t look native, then it wouldn’t get built.

Not caring that it feels bad and "wanting a similar experience" are two completely different things. Zero people crave a user experience being how it is because it's similar to the experience on another platform.

> Zero people crave a user experience being how it is because it's similar to the experience on another platform.

Count one here. The main thing for me is: does it solve my problem? Not: is it native/does it look unique, etc.

"Does it solve my problem" is not "does it look like it looks for other people".

And frankly, I think you would be pretty annoyed to try to use software that's designed to look and work like Windows 8's half-baked Metro UI if you're on Mac or Linux. What you said comes from a place of assuming it's a good baseline.

Nobody forces you to use the applications, you’re free to create native counterparts that fit your scenario (enjoy recreating everything while you’re at it).

> Let's not pretend this is what users want.

It’s what I want, as long as it integrates with native shortcuts. Great examples that I like: VScode, Obsidian. I couldn’t care less if they look native or not.

We are demonstrably not free to reimplement all closed applications. Slack and Discord are two notorious offenders who consider third-party clients a TOS violation. We can argue over the technical feasibility of enforcing this policy, but plenty of people are forced to use these applications as a condition of their employment and are unable to replace them with native counterparts.

We can also argue that employment and computing in general are voluntary activities, simultaneously preserving and significantly weakening your argument.

Where did I ever say you’re free to leech off their backend? Reimplement full package.

This is not a popular belief anymore. It used to be mainstream in 2010 but now it's pretty much extinct.

True. Now everything tries to emulate iOS :)

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