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by armchair_expert 861 days ago
I blame Microsoft for this. They release a completely new UI framework every 5 years, completely abandoning the old ones. The design is outdated and boring. The XAML based UI frameworks look terrible if you use the default settings, and force you to customize. It's great that it's easy to create custom UIs, but terrible for consistency between apps.

On the Apple side, things look a lot better. They were able to keep most apps using the native UI.

1 comments

Apple was just as bad. :( They switched at least 5 times in the early 2000s. Like you point out though they finally seemed to have calmed down.

MS had it in the bag too! Everyone wanted that 'sticker'. If you didnt have it almost no one would put your software on the shelf. To get that sticker you had to pass their usability tests that followed their style guide. Then they did like you said and switched it at least 2 times ever OS release.

Plus the web got in there and there were almost zero standards there. So we ended up with dozenes of framerworks that 'do it for you' and those have at least 3-5 generations of goop.