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0 pointsilyt3y ago0 comments

Remember times where you could change the theme and all of the apps followed suit ?

Even in Linux there were tools to sync gnome with QT look so you could have one theme applied to every app for nice and consistent look, all the way to how the common icons look.

Nowadays ? Every fucking app gotta have their own different styling. Will the setting icon be three dots, gear, or honey badger ? WHO FUCKING KNOWS. You'd be lucky if you even get a choice between light and dark theme

But hey, we can write same code to work on windows, mac and mobile ! It will work shit in all of them and be slow but we don't care!

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14 comments · 8 top-level

pdntspa3y ago· 3 in thread

Even better, every app is doing their own styling so they can all look like Discord

noisy_boy3y ago

Is it just me or there are others who find discords handling of threads terrible?! I mean Slack is far from my favourite but at least they treat a thread like a thread where I can see the entire conversation in one place instead of visually parsing questions and replies while frantically scrolling up and down.

farhanhubble3y ago

Discord and Teams both have terrible UX. Discord has the look and feel of a poorly designed game and Teams can't even get highlight and focus right.

mavhc3y ago

Threads in Discord appear in the sidebar usually. Are you thinking of replies?

1 more reply

hnzix3y ago· 2 in thread

> Will the setting icon be three dots?

Multiple hamburger menus with a scattering of cryptic icons stuck at arbitrary places on the screen. What does the swirly icon with up arrow do? No text label for you!

Oh and let's move the next button to the top left of the screen and not highlight it. Mmmm that's some good UI design.

foobarbecue3y ago

Might be a coincidence, but that's a weirdly accurate description of MS Teams.

n3storm3y ago

Not mentioning about the wording (at least in spanish) is awful too.

AndrewKemendo3y ago· 1 in thread

Oh man I totally forgot about that. Thank you for the reminder.

Total flashbacks to windows 95 and every so often changing the windows color, text font etc. for the entire system

Good times

balder19913y ago

A lot of native apps on iOS still at least follow the light/dark theme and global font sizes. But I’m not sure if that works by default with Flutter or React Native etc. or if they’d have to implement it explicitly.

wheybags3y ago

I remember that theory. I also remember the reality that if you changed your background colour to anything but white, some app, somewhere, was going to become an unreadable black text on black background mess.

rewmie3y ago

> Nowadays ? Every fucking app gotta have their own different styling.

This has more to do with the current state of GUI frameworks than with developer mindset. Microsoft is between GUI frameworks and rumoured to have deprecated everything between win32 and WPF, and in the meantime they are pushing React Native. Apple doesn't seem to know what to do with desktop environments and is stuck between their legacy objective C frameworks which they seem to purposely hide any form of documentation and swift-based frameworks which are broken out of the box. Linux has a couple of options which are ugly as sin since ever. There's Qt, but their licensing scares away anyone with two brain cells to rub together.

So where are we left?

Well, with webview-based frameworks, which is the worst of both worlds but at least they don't look half bad.

Except that webview-based frameworks are a far lower-level abstraction than any native widget-based framework. Developers are forced to reinvent the wheel, and this means dropping any standard look-and-feel because that's already ugly to start with but takes even more work to get into a working state.

And all you want to do is to provide a GUI for users to click around.

thwarted3y ago

And it got worse with client side decorations. Now even window interactions are app-specific and don't adhere to global settings.

nicoco3y ago

> Even in Linux there were tools to sync gnome with QT look

There are still such tools, you don't have to use the past tense here.

sublinear3y ago

> Every fucking app gotta have their own different styling

Have you considered that the average user never cared and never will?

Having ultra consistent styling across all apps ruins the ability to... you know... sell the software. It gives far too much power to some group of annoying elitist nerds in denial of their opinions preaching UI/UX pseudoscience.

> But hey, we can write same code to work on windows, mac and mobile ! It will work shit in all of them and be slow but we don't care!

Ain't nobody got time for reading even shittier documentation for badly written OS APIs.

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