[ArkyBeagle]

I've used Tk many, many times as a foundation of a temporary strawman interface while the real UI experts ... do whatever it is they do. I've also used it for custom instrumentation GUIs.

That 90% constitutes a lingua franca.

Not knocking the nice UI/UX folks - they work their corner, I work mine, and it's nice to have a technology to bridge schedules. My observation is that that 10% consumes as much as 1000% of the schedule at times :)

[Arnt]

The first 90% are easy, the next 90% wear you out, and the final 90% are what makes a good product...

In my experience, the story of using a layered UI like this is that for a short while you use it, then customers start asking for features it cannot deliver and you start writing platform-specific code, then after a while the portable code is a minority. At some point there's a meeting in which someone points out that a particular platform is 90% of the value and wouldn't it be better to make do with just that 90%? Are these other platforms really worth the effort?

[ArkyBeagle]

ObDisclosure: I'm in the embedded/middleware space.

I dunno. My peers don't write UI much at all; I do these things as force multipliers for my own nefarious purposes.

None of it gets "published" in a formally supported way, so I don't have any accountability for 'em. They're intentionally ugly but not dissonantly so. The design is "look, but don't touch." I mainly use them to anticipate integration errors and do something useful to aid in diagnosis of those. The theme here is "it ain't me, babe" or "holy cow, thanks for finding that" - determination on that axis.

But I also put adequate instrumentation in to exploit in the first place. Seems to be a lost art.

To me, the perfect user interface is no user interface at all - maybe a "push to start" button - a physical button. Second best is command line/scripting, third is the sort of thing I write.

In the embedded space, you might get a perception that this is cheating. I just smile.