[mmm_grayons]

Honest question: can someone explain the focus a lot of the HN crowd seems to have on "native"-looking UI? I've used plenty of applications that don't look "native" and it doesn't bother me. Is there a reason to prefer it? I get that performance can be an advantage, but one can easily write a very performant application using something like Skia, or doing one's own GPU acceleration, without having any native look.

[mikelevins]

There are a few reasons to prefer a native look and feel.

One is that if the look and feel of an app is native to the platform then it can lean on a design language that users of the platform assume, which makes it easier for those users to understand how to use the UI. Affordances look and act the way they expect, which reduces the time and effort it takes them to learn a UI.

Another reason to prefer it is that a UI that doesn't look native stands out as different. Noticeable differences are information. If something in a UI gets your attention, it should be because it's telling you something meaningful. Gratuitous differences from the platform's UI standard are not telling you anything meaningful, so they're just noise.

A third reason is that native platforms provide their native looks and feels through standard frameworks that also provide substantial whole-system features beyond just making things look alike. For example, Mac users can rely on a common set of keystrokes to do the same things across almost all applications (and the exceptions are badly behaved). UIs built without the platform frameworks must either recapitulate all of these platform-wide conventions or just ignore them. Commonly, they just ignore them, which means that conventions that users take for granted stop working in some apps for no good reason.

[Daishiman]

Back in the day in Unix desktop land there were 4 or 5 different UI toolkits and they looked behaved in a massively different way. X looked like ass. QT looked less like ass but had totally overloaded UIs. The differences were even starker on lower-res displays.

Also back then browser apps were a novelty instead of how most people interact with computers most of the time, and thus anything that wasn't using a native toolkit stood out pretty bad. A few apps like MP3 players used it for their advantage, but I remember those as being mostly a confusing mess.

More importantly, font rendering has improved incredibly and most rendering looks the same across toolkits in the same desktop environment. Back then some toolkits supported antialiasing, some did not, some had godawful rendering that looked like crap, some couldn't render certain symbols correctly, some didn't have good hinting for LCDs, etc.

The reality is that very slowly most UI paradigms have converged into a few well-established patterns (no more multiple-window apps, no more focus-follows-mouse, no more deep right-clicked context menus, etc). So now the styling differences are more apparent but most UIs are functionally the same nowadays. The same could not be said 15 years.

We have come a long way; despite the different looks, the feel is much more uniform, and there's a better understanding of what makes for good UIs.

As I write this, I'm frankly quite thankful that we have reached this state of good-enoughness. Spending hours looking into GTK themes and different fonts was fun, but in a frustrating way in which no exact font-icon-theme combination was entirely satisfactory.

[twic]

I don't think X ever had a toolkit of its own, but i would guess you are thinking of Motif, because your description is spot on:

http://www.ist.co.uk/motif/books/vol6A/ch-3.fm.html

[Daishiman]

Indeed. It was about the closest you'd get to a standard X toolkit.

[ClumsyPilot]

It's a fantasy problem. Hold on before you downvote folks and count the number of 'native' applications that were written since year 2010.

Most consumer applications are now webapps or electron apps. From accounting software to music players, they are not native.

If someone botheres to make a desktop app, you either have proffeshionals tools or resource intensive applications like Adobe Photoshop, Blender3D, 3Dmax, IntelliJ IDE's and Games. None of them look native either!

Almost noone bothers to develop platform spesific apps, and native applications are dying. If we don't stop squabbling about native look and feel, we will get no native applications at all.

[erinaceousjones]

> Almost noone bothers to develop platform spesific apps, and native applications are dying. If we don't stop squabbling about native look and feel, we will get no native applications at all.

Well, unless you're talking open source tools and/or everythign within the sphere of desktop productivity . Then invariably your "consumer" desktop apps of choice are some mixture of GTK2/3, Qt, Swing, WxWidgets......

Granted, the different GUI libraries and applications using them tend to have _slight_ inconsistencies (GNOME 3 / GTK3 window titles versus everything else's window titles), but for the most part they're consistently themed, they render quickly, they behave the same way with the clipboard, mouse interactions, element focusing, keyboard shortcuts, accessibility functions......

So I have open right now LibreOffice Writer, Firefox, Evolution, many gnome-terminals, Transmission BT client, GNOME Files, GNOME Boxes... all of which look the same and there's no cognitive load spent switching between them, because they behave the same and look the same.

I can open up Inkscape and GIMP and Evince and KeePassXC and VLC and retain that experience.

Meanwhile, whilst still my IDE of choice, my PyCharm (so, JetBrains) IDE windows do whatever the hell they want (STOP STEALING FOCUS!!!), glitch out rendering, look completely different. And Spotify - gets all its points docked just for how it handles tabbing through UI elements. ("No, I don't want to tab through ALL of the Discover page, I want tab to cycle through the different UI elements, preferably not taking a painfully long time to reach "search".... Ugh fine, CONTRIBUTE TO MY CARPAL TUNNEL THEN!!!)

"Native" (as in, "consistent experience across the whole suite of desktop applications") toolkits still make it way easier for _developers_ to design applications consistent with the rest of the system.

Android and iOS UI toolkits serve same useful purpose. I tend to find that apps that are just a reactive web framework in a fullscreen frame are pretty painful to use. Like, wtf are you doing when I hit back!??? Why is this full screen splash form with two text boxes SCROLLING when I touch it???

tl;dr of my rant: Goddamn people stop trying to make your applications look the same on every device and let me use it how I like on MY device, for the same of a) my wrists and b) my attention deficit brain

[lmm]

I think Android and iOS killed the idea that you're ever going to be able to use a bunch of apps that behave consistently, because nowadays you're always using apps on at least two different platforms (phone and desktop). And it's far more important that Discord on my phone should look and feel like Discord on my desktop than having it match my other phone apps or my other desktop apps. So people have got over the idea that the platform is important and that apps need to match the platform conventions (rightly IMO; the platform is there to support the applications, not the other way around - of course it would be better if the platform makers could come together and agree some consistent cross-platform UI conventions that every app could use everywhere, but they didn't, so here we are).

[Bjartr]

If an app follows the UI conventions of the system it is running on, there is less cognitive overhead for users. However, with the rise of web apps users have at least become a little more used to interacting with a variety of UIs, though the problem is not entirely eliminated.

[Daishiman]

We've also eliminated a ton of crappy UI conventions and settled on some common paradigms in all platforms. I remember the four-layer-deep right-click context menus and I kinda shudder now.

There were also some really good ideas that I wish had caught on (I was a huge fan of focus-follows-mouse and I still use the X select-into-clipboard), but the general uniformity of UI patters nowadays is very much calming.

[nitrogen]

I really like the context menus in GIMP. Much less mouse travel than trying to hit the top of the window or screen.

[specialist]

True.

Main benefit to me is deflecting spurious input. All that Drive By Management.

Instead of explaining the history of ergonomics, the philosophy of ethnography, and our reams of data from usability testing, I'd just point at Apple's Human Interface Guidelines.

Like name dropping Aristotle in debate class.

More serious actors will try harder, lean in.

[fulafel]

In addition to Swing also Qt and Gtk spent a lot of effort on this. Not to mention browsers reimplementing look and feel of native controls (not sure if they're still doing it). So it was wider than HN definitely. Other toolkits took the native route from the other direction (eg wxWdigets I think embeds the actual native widgets?).