Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits.
It looks and works so intuitively.
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Modern toolkits just do a lot of stuff that older toolkits didn't. Some times at the expense of not being as quick to get off the ground as VB was.
The original winforms implementation in the early 2000's was pretty close to VB in terms of efficiency but its warts were numerous, e.g. the DPI used in the designer view (when writing the code) affected what happens when you run it, and so on.
Which can make each app fit the appearance of the given desktop.
Old guis also had more accssibility features.
The only thing modern ones have going for them is animation and visual customization.
Other point is noted. But let’s compare the alternative:
1. Fiddle with a config file for each app for a week. Distro includes this in dark mode set. 2. Each app writes custom code to listen for and adapt to dark mode events.
macOS introduced system-wide dark mode a few years ago, but app developers had to recompile and opt into it. This was done so that they could adjust their artwork and overridden colors to it. Windows 10 added dark mode, but only for "modern"/UWP apps. Classic Win32 apps need to implement their own dark mode with custom themes/controls (like Explorer does).
That's why in for example Windows, up until ~early/mid W7, you could set both TextCoulour and BackgroundColour to whatever contrast you wanted, and then all apps respected that.
Yeah, that's a moronic developer. So what? Moronic developers have always existed, and still do. You can't blame toolkits or OSes for their existence.
> Classic Win32 apps need to implement their own dark mode with custom themes/controls (like Explorer does).
Only since Windows was enshittified from ~Windows 8. (Though the first signs came in late W7.) Before that, you set whatever systemwide theme you wanted -- Light, Dark, Hilarious Clowncar -- in the Control Panel, and all apps followed that.
Well, almost all... Some, then many, fuckwit companies refused to follow the user's system-wide settings, and of course now nobody does because there are none. (Ironically, among the first offenders, and certainly the most influential, was Microsoft itself.)
But old Windows was far better at these things than current, and AFAICT at least as good as, possibly better than, any current Linux DE.
Maybe not now, but back in the day, that was utter BS. You pretty mucch had to go out of your way not to have your app use whatever colour palette the user had decided on. Well, on Windows, at least. (And here I thought people used to brag about programming tools on Linux being better than on Windows; are you saying that in at least this respect, they werern't better even then?)
> Only trivial apps would work by changing some system-wide palette.
That must be why almost ALL Windows apps up until at least ~2010 worked just fine by changing the system-wide palette.
> Also, if there is any artwork (button icons etc) then that has to be done in two or more sets, for varying backgrounds. Few icons would work well on both a light and dark background.
Oh, it worked well enough. (Mostly, I suppose, by the super-advanced trick of using colours pretty much midway between light and dark.)
It's amazing how almost nobody in discussions like this ever acknowledges that. Are all the GNOME kiddies just so determined never to admit anything else could be better at anything, or do they genuinely not know how much shittier stuff is now than Windows was only a dozen years ago?
> Of course it lacks features we want today, especially things we are used to from the web, like highlighting fields with errors in them etc.,
Yeah, that's unfortunately true. But, since the definition of "What is an error?" is up to the app, it feels kind of excusable that pointing it out in the UI also did. Sure, could have been easily fixed with two more settings -- ErrorTextColour and ErrorBackgroundColour, something like that... But absent those, clear reds and yellows work pretty well (for the non-colourblind). You'd have to intentionally set your UI to be pretty garish for those to be taken for "normal" colours.
> but I often think new features can't entirely explain why the newer toolkits are so much less ergonomically useable.
All I can come up with is "Kids today, sigh".
As a Linux enthusiast I agree. Microsoft built windows for utility, and did a lot of research to determine what worked. It took all the best ideas from other UI toolkits and refined them.
It's absurd that making a scrolling list of ~5000 items is a performance problem for modern applications when it's completely solved in Windows 95.
A custom config can be made for each program to addresses all idiosyncrasies and that could be shipped with the distro as "dark mode" without any code change.