This indeed. Custom UI widgets for Windows apps are really not necessary most of the time, and fitting in with the system theme is all you ought to aim for, most of the time.

There are exceptions, for very rich dense UI, for UIs that need to be cross-platform, but if you're writing a Windows app, it should look and feel like a Windows app.

> and fitting in with the system theme is all you ought to aim for, most of the time

Even Microsoft struggles with that.

Only because they change the system theme every 45 minutes.

Seriously, someone needs to reign in their UI department. No more refreshes until you actually finish one.

> There are exceptions, for very rich dense UI, for UIs that need to be cross-platform

That’s not exceptional at all. That’s completely normal requirements that are probably in the majority.

Does Microsoft themselves build their apps this way?

Most applications would be fine with a button on Windows looking like a Windows button, a button on Mac looking like a Mac button, a button on Android looking like a Material Design button and a button on iPhone looking like a UIKit button.

You need consistency in the icons, layouts and concepts, but you don't need every widget to look exactly the same on every platform.

Right. I want your app to have consistency with the platform I’m using. Not between all platforms.

With the exception of games try to use the native GUI. It’s the best choice most of the time.

Depends on the app size also.

Is your app as large and important as the OS of the device (Chrome/facebook/etc...) you should probably have similar language across devices.

Is your app very large but not that large? (Slack/teams come to mind) I think you can go either way.

If you are smaller than that (hint: you are) then you should comply with the design language of the platform, even if that means somewhat large changes such as moving buttons from the left to the right. The likelihood that users are constantly using your app on a iphone and android is really low.

I disagree. I think the only apps where a custom UI make sense are games and I’m willing to accept highly specialized business apps that have their own conventions. Thinks like Blender, AutoCad, Logic, etc.

I’d still like to see them try to match a little, but they’re specialized enough I get that may be a better path.

Chrome? Facebook? Slack? Teams? No.

I’m not saying things need to look like MyFirstWin32App built with VB6 in 20 minutes.

But use the system controls and conventions. Custom colors and layouts can be fine. But if you want to make your own UI toolkit then make your own OS too and leave my computer alone.

> Is your app as large and important as the OS of the device (Chrome/facebook/etc...) you should probably have similar language across devices.

No app is more important than the OS, and certainly not Facebook (which has no business being an app in the first place). I made a choice when I got the OS, and I like developers respecting it and not chase the fad of the day with poor approximations of the native widgets (text fields that do not support standard shortcuts, buttons that do not behave as they should, labels that do not support accessibility features, the list could go on). Even huge apps like Photoshop or Office get this wrong everywhere.

I definitely agree on the default (use the native toolkit), but there are no applications big enough to get their own behaviour. Open Source or hobby applications get a pass if the UI is a bit wonky, but that’s about it.

> Does Microsoft themselves build their apps this way?

I'm not sure anyone could really answer this question considering how fast Microsoft's various silos pinball between UI conventions. All of them are (I would hope) based on various iterations of their own internal tooling, but looking from Windows 7 to 8, 10, and then 11, you get such stark differences in UI language that you feel like you're looking at competing products.

That being said, I would personally very much prefer apps that are built to mimic the system they are a part of. One of the worst sins of that one, IMO, being iTunes on Windows which has always been and continues to be a flaming dumpster fire for a number of reasons, but most especially it's UI. It is a Mac app that is parked in Windows. It looks like a Mac app, it operates like a Mac app, it's UI conventions are that of the Mac, with the one major difference being they stuffed the window controls in the window in an incredibly slapdash way to account for Windows not having the system bar.

But yeah, for any marketing people here, I have not once nor will I ever give a single molecule of a shit about your brand identity. Make your software good. Ideally make it mesh with the system it's in. I couldn't fucking care less what color everything is.

Or if you’re making games. All games seem to cherish a unique look even starting from the game menu or title screen.

I, for one, miss customized installers. We've kind of lost out on those what with the move to digital distribution.

Gone are the days of my friend accidentally having his volume cranked when he inserted the Red Alert 2 disc, not knowing it would blast out "WARINING! Military Software Detected!"

My experience with SwiftUI on the Mac is that it still needs a lot of work. Documentation is poor. Performance can be bad if you do things in a straightforward way. Supporting older versions of the OS is quite painful etc.

    > Documentation is poor.

This is the first I heard about SwiftUI. Maybe I am mixed up and docs are excellent for Swift, but not SwiftUI?

I recently built a small app using SwiftUI. It was my first, and pretty simple.

The documentation was absolutely maddening.. Half the time the Apple docs referred to a previous version. “Do this thing in XCode” often included screenshots of UIs that don’t exist in the current version of XCode. Examples I found on Stackoverflow or random blogs were usually no longer applicable.

It felt like magic when it worked, all those VStack HStack nestings, but the annoyance of finding my way there made me seriously doubt whether I’d build a big app with SwifUI, especially if I wasn’t working alone.

Thanks for the follow-up. These types of anec-data are the best part of HN.

    > It felt like magic when it worked, all those VStack HStack nestings

I know the feeling from Qt. I think Gtk and many other GUI toolkits use the equivalent of VStack and HStack to make resizable GUIs. Some GUI toolkits try to avoid this problem by using a grid layout, but it is more rare.

EDIT

    > made me seriously doubt whether I’d build a big app with SwiftUI

From your experience, what GUI toolkit would you prefer? And, it would help to know what is your target UI platform.

I’ve had overall very positive experiences with Flutter. If I wasn’t concerned about Google’s long term commitment to it I’d use it for everything.

Did you do cross-platform and if so, did you use the same UI style for everything?

Today I was making a list of reasons/excuses for using Material Design on Mac… which I guess would make some people mad, but it might work for an enterprise product.

Yes cross platform and the same style. I don't think this matters much to users today. They're used to it.

That said I did do a fair bit of my own theming. The Flutter Material widgets are actually pretty customizable and I'm not a big fan of vanilla Material.

https://plastaq.com/minimoon

I don’t have much app experience, I’m mostly a back-end guy trying to build some prototypes and (hopefully) one product.

I’m not in a position to give anyone advice, but I’d love to find SwiftUI but cross-platform and usable from anything other than XCode (well maybe not Ed…) and native GUI and a pony.

For my product I need to support Mac, Windows and eventually iOS/iPadOS. For prototypes iOS is enough. I don’t mind learning new languages for this, but ideally there would be some advantage in knowing the language itself. I’ve been looking at lots of frameworks over the past month.

The most tempting thing so far is Flutter, but I have nagging doubts: because it’s not native UI, I worry about that being a no-go for some large customer down the road, and also about alienating power users. I looked at React Native but it’s not very good for desktop yet as far as I could tell (and the demo app from the documentation doesn’t work, which is a bad sign). Which is too bad because I was impressed with Expo, if I just needed phones I’d probably use that. I looked at Avalonia but it has the opposite problem.

Today I’m looking at Tauri for the Nth time: at least I could improve my Rust, and it seems to have momentum. Doing the UI in a web view is kinda sad, though, after trying SwiftUI.

Just building multiple apps is not realistic, I’m a solo dev and want to get this to market in my lifetime, and it only makes sense if I have both Mac and Windows.

Very happy to hear recommendations from people who have done this!

If you really want native look and feel then really your only choice is to use the native toolkits.

I'm not convinced many users care that much about this though. They spend most of their day using apps that don't use native controls and I think they're all pretty used to it by now.

I prototyped a bunch of different desktop toolkits and I think that today Flutter is by far the most polished and mature. I've had overall a very positive experience using it for my music app:

https://plastaq.com/minimoon

The threat of Google canceling it is real though. I suppose if that happens I'll switch to Tauri or just give up on Windows and Android and do SwiftUI. My experiences with SwiftUI to this point have not been very positive though.

Kotlin Multiplatform might also be an option at some point but it doesn't seem that close today. Unfortunately it seems like none of the os vendors are making their desktop APIs a priority these days.

Thanks, I will have a look at that. Serendipitously, I'm in the market for a new music player!

Yeah the Google risk... seems like they came out strong in support of Flutter at their last dev conference, but at the same time it does _not_ look like they're using it for their main apps.

Please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions for the player.

And yes I’d feel more confident in Flutter if Google was dogfooding it a lot more.

Without expressing an opinion on Flutter as such, it's worth remembering that Google is a big enough organisation that even -some- internal apps being built using it is quite a commitment, and it not having spread further internally could easily be a social or political rather than a technical issue.

I don't think it it's a technical issue. On a technical level Flutter is mostly great. But Google has been doing aggressive cost cutting lately and not having Flutter in use in that many apps makes it more vulnerable.

    > If you really want native look and feel then really your only choice is to use the native toolkits.

What about Qt?

Yes. Two different things. The SwiftUI docs are mostly just listings of functions and not much explanation of how to use them.

Plus, half of the official examples are given to you as a full Xcode project that you must download and import

Documentation remains the number one reason I personally don't make Android apps and why electron/web apps are the way to go for most GUI apps these days.

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like having good, bug free, modern and well documented desktop APIs is a priority for anyone anymore.

He should have used C++Builder. Native Windows widgets (so you get, eg, IME support) but it can theme them. And comes with dark themes!