

Why don't people make beautiful looking software for Windows? - alizaki

I had to recently move from a Mac to a PC and realized that while there are an infinite number of software available, but they are all almost exclusively feature bloated and just horribly hard to use.&#60;p&#62;Seems like this problem is an opportunity for someone to come in and fill the void...&#60;p&#62;Also, if you know a good Todo list application for Windows which works like Things on the Mac, I'd be most obliged.
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DCoder
Microsoft has published their UI Design Guidelines, but it gets largely
ignored as far as I can see - as long as developers don't see UI polish as a
high priority issue, it gets pushed back as long as possible like other
"polishing" tasks. I know I was certainly guilty of this when I was working in
Delphi, less so nowadays. (And if Raymond Chen's stories are any indicator,
developers in general are too lazy to RTFM at all, why would they bother
looking for any guidelines for a low priority task.)

If you develop a desktop app on your company's time, your boss will find a
million more important things to do than to make sure keyboard accelerators
work, make sense, or are configurable. If you do it on your own, you will
probably find a different million of things to improve, like the main number
crunching loop. After all, you're coding it primarily for yourself so why do
you care what Alt-W or Ctrl-U do in your app, you use the mouse. Maybe if you
publish it, you'll get some feedback from users and you fix it, but it's more
likely that they'll just decide it's "no more limited than that other tool"
and you'll never know that it is a problem for them.

Not to mention there are varied GUI toolkits available depending on the
programming language you use, each with its own style - Borland's VCL,
especially with its button graphics which stand out to this day; MFC;
wxWidgets... each with their own idea of how things should be handled. And
there's OwnerDraw, giving the more "hardcore" coders another chance to shoot
themselves in the foot by allowing the application to draw the control as it
saw fit, which of course means they cannot take advantage of the new Windows
common controls themes.

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BSousa
I think the main problem, and I do work as UX Engineer in WPF (though I
develop for iPhone/Mac at home) is the experience.

Windows has a "you are the developer, you choose how to do whatever the hell
you like" experience, while Mac is more "here are our libraries, love them,
sing praise to them, but try and keep it the same as much of everything else".

I was talking recently about the look of a new version of an application, and
one thing I tried to pass was to keep it looking very well integrated with
Windows 7 look. Avoid custom themes and colors, but 80% of the developers
believe a custom theme is better. This in general doesn't make software ugly,
but when you don't have (or don't want to have) the resources for a good
graphics design team to do the entire design of the app, it leaves choices on
the hands of programmers (not the best designers imo). Comparing to Cocoa/Mac,
usually programmers use less of custom themes and go with the Cocoa flow,
making the applications slightly more elegant (as they are using the resources
of the Mac Design team).

But this is in no way 100% true for both platforms, there are really horrible
designed apps for Mac, and gorgeous applications for Windows, just what I feel
to be the general trend.

Edit: I like ToDoList:
<http://www.codeproject.com/KB/applications/todolist2.aspx> It is as you say,
a bit bloated, but works fine for keeping track of my programming tasks (it
isn't GTD, just a hierarchal ToDo list, and open source)

~~~
alizaki
thanks for the tip :)

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DerekL
It's the customers. Users and software buyers who are interested in design,
usability and looks are more likely to use Macs. So Windows developers are
less harshly punished in the marketplace for ugly or clunky software.

And there's positive feedback. One reason people buy Macintoshes is because
they like the software better.

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weilawei
It was not always this way. Tides change.

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anactofgod
OS is as OS does.

