Still don't understand how we went from this to modern GUI toolkits.
It looks and works so intuitively.
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It looks and works so intuitively.
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).
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.
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.