Ask HN: What's the best UI creation method of all time?

ocdtrekkie · on Nov 5, 2018

WinForms. Drag and drop. Drag to resize. Each object has a handy block of understandable property fields to adjust how it looks and behaves. Double click to open up an auto-created function to run when you click it, just add functionality from there.

Sure, WinForms did not really output a stylish UI design, but I have yet to see anyone make a functionally useful UI editor that is nearly as convenient and approachable.

yesenadam · on Nov 6, 2018

I used Borland C++ Builder (with Windows ME) from about 2000 on, sounds exactly the same, except you could make it look however you wanted. I loved it.

(Not until recent months reading about Xerox PARC/Smalltalk and playing around with Squeak did I realize how much it all just came from there, suddenly OOP made sense!)

PaulHoule · on Nov 5, 2018

WPF and Silverlight WPF. Also Java FX.

I am not a big fan of GUI UI editors because I like building the GUI from models instead. Microsoft had a strong vision in the Visual Basic era that they've carried through for some time.

ocdtrekkie · on Nov 5, 2018

WPF has nowhere near the ease of use of WinForms. I get it can do a lot more, but at the cost of a truly amazing development interface.

PaulHoule · on Nov 9, 2018

I did a stint of Silverlight and got very familiar with the themeing capabilities in WPF.

Themeing was a scouge of the Windows 9x age that developers had largely given up on and the support for theming in WPF as part of the backlash against what people perceived as visual excess.

It was fun for me to see this "visual excess" at work years later in the 2-d graphics of games written against Sony's PhyreEngine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhyreEngine

such as

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Universe_(video_game)

Even though people hated Vista, the WDDM model that it brought in is one reason why Windows crashes much less than it used to and why GPGPU computing is a thing. Someday Linux is going to switch to Wayland or something else like WDDM.

PaulHoule · on Nov 5, 2018

I want to see more things like Zork and Inform7.

lj3 · on Nov 6, 2018

Why? What about Zork and Inform7 do you like?

PaulHoule · on Nov 6, 2018

Text-based UI that is smarter than the conventional command line.

With Zork you somehow have a (seemingly) plain-English conversation with the computer that takes you through a fictional setting and story.

With Inform7 you write the scenario in what looks like plain-English (eg. "The shed is north of the building") and it compiles to a Zork-compatible runtime engine.

Inform7 uses a number of "clever" tricks such as accepting the word "seven" for the number 7 that are unusual in software practice, not conceptually deep, but contribute to the illusion that you're writing English. The rules engine is half-baked but confronts head-on the problem that "commonsense knowledge" that it is mostly built around defaults. (eg. by default you can not pick an object up, but if an object has the "portable" attribute you can pick it up, unless it is a bird statue that will turn into a real bird and fly away when you try to catch it unless you are wearing the medallion)

The author of Inform7 would like to enable English majors to write interactive fiction and the success there is still partial because once the story gets complex enough the authors have a hard time understanding why the system does what it does.

The author of Inform7 is plugging away at it, maybe somewhere somebody else is building something similar out of stronger wood. I was talking with a European aviation regulator who would love to see "Inform 7 for business rules".

It is much easier for rules in this kind of system to be readable by subject matter experts than writable, but readability is a big plus -- if you can show the rules on a slide and a get a check-off that is a great way to keep in sync.

scroot · on Nov 6, 2018

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