Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gus_tpm 311 days ago
I honestly don't think it's really all down to being greedy. Even the Linux desktop suffers from this to some extent.

I think it's because UI design is very much something that can't really be "solved" in the traditional sense, so a lot of us use our own opinions when we inevitably find a corner case that isn't working exactly the way we want.
2 comments
skydhash 310 days ago
> a lot of us use our own opinions when we inevitably find a corner case that isn't working exactly the way we want.

Most standard toolkits provide escape hatches to have your custom components. I think most designers wants their view imposed to the users instead of following the platform constraints. Like instead of the standard play/pause button every player have, they want their own custom ones. Instead of using the standard tree widget, they want to create another that is the same, but behaves a bit differently. And then they say GTK is not good, let's go with HTML in Electron.

link
const_cast 310 days ago
Linux has two application toolkits and they work pretty well together. Windows, again, has a dozen. And they're closed source. Microsoft could just... not... do that. They control the entire thing. But they chose to do it.

Greed is maybe not the right word, but maybe it's more like ideological greed. Like everyone wants things their way 100%. They won't settle for 99%!

Like okay, with Apple and vulkan and metal, is vulkan the best API? No. Is it the most performant? No.

But it's pretty fucking good. Its 95% of the way there. But for greedy apple, that's not good enough. So they say "fuck you, heres metal, good luck developers!"

And now people only make Mac apps if there's a gun to their head and they really need that tiny slice of market share.

Its the same thing with Qt versus bespoke UIs in ImGUI or whatever. Qt is really, really good. Its not perfect.

But we're really gonna burn it all down and start over for like... a 1% improvement in code architecture or something? Really? We're chopping off both our legs so that our pinky finger hurts slightly less?

Sigh. Okay. Such is the way of developers, I guess.

link