[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).