Hacker News Reader

Comment by tavavex | Hacker News Reader

The hidden reason why so many people are frustrated with 'modern design' that goes unaddressed is that most software nowadays completely ignores the standards of the system it runs on. Every single developer of even the most trivial apps insists that their design language is the most important in the room, which is what brings us to the temptation of using a webapp for everything so every user on every OS sees the exact same thing. It's gotten so bad that the only places I see native system UIs from third parties is either older software or hobbyist projects, but never anything corporate.

View on HN

> most software nowadays completely ignores the standards of the system it runs on

Good, sticking to design conventions of the OS may not be a good fit for the specific software (e.g. think about a video editor). And even in more-tame cases, people have different aesthetic preferences (e.g. a minimalist text editor).

My software, a video browser / organizer, looks better than anything I've come across (for my preferences). For example, sticking to OS conventions would have required more padding around everything, decreasing functionality - https://videohubapp.com

Some of that is also that what "native UI" means has shifted a bit. To look at Windows, Win95 had a thoroughly considered UI design that was very well adapted to both what it needed to do and the hard constraints on it. Win11 is... kind of a shitshow. (Are parts of it still from Windows 3.1? I haven't tried to track them down... but in Win10 there were a few dark corners.) It made sense to match the native UI in the Win95 days. It often doesn't now, it's simply not a target worth hitting. You could just use Win32 and target the older Win95 look, but apart from appearance issues, it was designed to work well in 1995, and we simply demand different things from our UIs now. Like support for touchscreens. Old Win32 apps are painful on touchscreens. (But, often, awesome without a mouse.) And those are real considerations, not oooh-shiny-new-thing designer BS.

Yes, modern Windows design is a bit of a mess, caused by both the designer bug of redesigning everything (we have had at least 3 different Windows design languages prevalent over the last 10 years) and Windows having to support extremely old legacy software. The second was almost nonexistent when Windows 95 was designed, they could have a true clean slate, so the comparison isn't as fair. But still, even with the abundance of native UI frameworks, the point holds true that no new software uses any of them, no matter if it's Win32 or WinUI. They could implement them very easily, and some hobbyist software does so, and it looks very native and in-line with the rest of Windows 11, but they choose not to.

And yes, the 3.11 ODBC file selector is still in Windows 11. Praise be to legacy components.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com