[tomphoolery]

> I just hate GUIs for development, especially when you Google how to do something, and the answer is a series of 17 “click here and there”s that are no longer valid because all the GUI stuff moved somewhere else in the last update.

It's not just developer tools that suffer from this problem. I opened iMovie recently after not playing with it for almost 10 years, and was so flabbergasted at how everything worked. Took me almost 2 weeks to sync my own song to a series of cut video clips (cut out of larger videos, which was the main problem). Maybe I'm just an idiot, but googling around for solutions ended up with either out-of-date answers or completely unrelated problems.

I just wish that the app would use even one or two conventions from the 40-50 years of GUI research that has been done...

[TwoBit]

I'm convinced that the reason for the constant game of GUI musical chairs - of which Microsoft is the most guilty - is due to developers attempting to justify their employment.

[Legogris]

My experience has been the opposite - developers being resistant to frontend changes, which tend to get pushed through by UI/UX people (which is their job), or in more broken organizations, opinionated managers or executives.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Software production busy work! New code, new UI, new already-out-of-date documentation.

Drives user engagement too: people spend longer in your app (working out how the fuck to use it, again!).

[fit2rule]

You're right that developers do this, but in this case I would say its because the designers have to justify their existence. as a class of developer.

An interface which lasts generations because its good is not the same, necessarily, as this years hot new ideology among the design elite.

[noizejoy]

The IT industry benefits from fashionable UIs (dark or bright, angular or rounded, 2D or 3D, etc.) and architectures (server centric, client centric, etc.) quite similarly to the fashion industry benefiting from rising and falling hemlines and wide vs skinny ties.

If you live long enough, you see cycles repeat.

[pjmlp]

Cycles are quite common in IT fashion industry, Microsoft isn't the only one playing the game, others are much worse.

Try to compare the Android best practices across all IOs since Android exists.

[jedieaston]

It’s hilarious that it was easier for me to adjust to FCPX than to try to move my amateur video editing brain to new iMovie, so much so that I just renew my trial once a year instead of try to use iMovie. They ported the iOS version and it shows (especially considering how many features are missing from iMovie 09).

[galad87]

Actually iMovie on macOS is based con FCPX.

[asiachick]

Even many programming examples are long out of date. Google for how to do something and the top answers are 10-15 years old using jquery or C++11 etc...