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by memoriyato3 27 days ago
I use an app to switch the Windows system theme between light/dark automatically based on time of day (similar to auto blue color reduction).

It's funny noticing how most Electron/WebViews/web-sites immediately switch too, and have good dark mode support, while non-web-tech native apps either only support light-mode, have a bad looking incomplete dark-mode, or require a restart to switch.

So much for "native GUIs are superior, consistent and respect the user". Microsoft is still struggling with adding dark mode support to most Windows included apps.
2 comments
skydhash 27 days ago
You can easily implement dark mode in a toolkit, you just add the new colors and switch based on the user preferences. The issue is that a lot of apps hard coded colors against the light background of the widgets. If you can find a solution for that, please share it.

That’s why people like the old windows interface (windows 2k). It was fully themable.

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wongarsu 27 days ago
Native GUIs used to be superior, consistent and respect the user. Adobe lead the way with making a GUI that's a branding experience, completely devolved from the OS theme, and in the last decade most have started following their lead.

Add to that the lack of leadership and cohesion demonstrated by MS when it comes to GUIs. The original Win32 GUI was good, with lots of UX research and user testing behind it, and Borland made a great library and visual designer for it (a major selling point of Delphi). MS copied it for .NET as WinForms. That was the peak. Early to mid 2000s, depending on whether you prefer the Windows 2000 or Windows XP look. Themeable, fast, easy to design and intuitive to use, clear visual language with good user feedback.

Then MS tried to make everything better with WPF. Then they tried again with WinUI, originally coupled to Windows Store apps (remember when MS still believed in that?). But whichever team was responsible for those within MS apparently didn't even have enough authority and resources to move more than a couple high-visibility OS components to it. Not to mention the mediocre features, dev experience and user experience

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cosmic_cheese 27 days ago
That move of Adobe’s drives me nuts even now. It might be my imagination but as I recall, the UI of Photoshop for example felt more responsive (at least on Mac) in 7/CS1/CS2 before they switched to the branded-UI mess (despite the hardware of that era being so much weaker than today’s), and visual contrast and readability was better before too.
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