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| A Companion to the X-Y Problem - The IKEA Effect |
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| nfmax:
--- Quote from: tooki on May 31, 2020, 11:36:19 am ---FYI, MS Office is a perfect example of a cross-platform app done right, IMHO: it’s a portable “engine”, with platform-specific UI written natively on that platform. A perfect counterexample to a wxwidgets app. Microsoft learned the hard way (back in 1994 with Word 6 for Mac) that simply porting over the Windows interface doesn’t result in a native-feeling app, and users rejected it resoundingly. So they buckled down and rewrote the interface for the Mac version of Office, keeping all the core design the same (for ease of going back and forth, as you say), but making sure that it’s a full-fledged Mac app, with the details gotten right, so that it doesn’t feel like a Windows app. So while the core code is portable, the user interface code is not. --- End quote --- Don't forget Excel was ported from MacOs to Windows, as the Mac version came first. |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: nfmax on May 31, 2020, 02:02:55 pm --- --- Quote from: tooki on May 31, 2020, 11:36:19 am ---FYI, MS Office is a perfect example of a cross-platform app done right, IMHO: it’s a portable “engine”, with platform-specific UI written natively on that platform. A perfect counterexample to a wxwidgets app. Microsoft learned the hard way (back in 1994 with Word 6 for Mac) that simply porting over the Windows interface doesn’t result in a native-feeling app, and users rejected it resoundingly. So they buckled down and rewrote the interface for the Mac version of Office, keeping all the core design the same (for ease of going back and forth, as you say), but making sure that it’s a full-fledged Mac app, with the details gotten right, so that it doesn’t feel like a Windows app. So while the core code is portable, the user interface code is not. --- End quote --- Don't forget Excel was ported from MacOs to Windows, as the Mac version came first. --- End quote --- Yep. PowerPoint, too. In fact, there was Word for Mac before there was for Windows. (But Word for DOS was a smidgen earlier.) However, with the 1994 release of Office, they replaced all the existing Mac versions (which had been totally independent from the Windows versions) with ports of the Windows versions. It did not land well. Hence why, for the 1998 edition, they really worked hard to create a proper Mac experience. |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: nctnico on May 31, 2020, 11:48:47 am --- --- Quote from: tooki on May 31, 2020, 11:36:19 am ---Writing ≠ designing. As a (former) user interface designer (and technical writer), I’m absolutely aware of the extra work that fully native user interfaces demand. The claim I am refuting is your claim that cross platform environments do not entail compromise. They absolutely do. If you can’t access the full range of controls on a platform, it’s a compromise. --- End quote --- This claim seems to be based on a short cursory look at wxWidgets. Which controls are you missing precisely? --- End quote --- It doesn’t take an in-depth examination of the API docs to determine whether “are all widgets present” is true or not, since a single missing widget suffices to disprove the claim. One that I looked for (because I know Windows doesn’t have it) is the “image well” control, and as expected it was not there. |
| nctnico:
--- Quote from: tooki on May 31, 2020, 03:02:29 pm --- --- Quote from: nctnico on May 31, 2020, 11:48:47 am --- --- Quote from: tooki on May 31, 2020, 11:36:19 am ---Writing ≠ designing. As a (former) user interface designer (and technical writer), I’m absolutely aware of the extra work that fully native user interfaces demand. The claim I am refuting is your claim that cross platform environments do not entail compromise. They absolutely do. If you can’t access the full range of controls on a platform, it’s a compromise. --- End quote --- This claim seems to be based on a short cursory look at wxWidgets. Which controls are you missing precisely? --- End quote --- It doesn’t take an in-depth examination of the API docs to determine whether “are all widgets present” is true or not, since a single missing widget suffices to disprove the claim. One that I looked for (because I know Windows doesn’t have it) is the “image well” control, and as expected it was not there. --- End quote --- An image selector is not part of the base of wxWidgets indeed but it is available as a control from the samples which come with the (official) book and several other places. The same goes for many other controls and components. All in all it seems to me you are dismissing a very good solution based on prejudice. From a programmer's perspective the OS specific part of the user interface is an extremely thin layer which is very easy to adapt to OS specific requirements. People tend to overlook that and say 'it's all wrong' while in reality the amount of work needed to make some modifications is very small. Like painting a wall in a different color can make a huge difference. But you have to be able to see that the actual change is very minor. Microsoft didn't need to rewrite the UI for Mac for MS-Word; they only needed to add some MAC specific features. After all the workflow related part of the UI is the same. Modern Linux distributions have a whole bunch of different UI styles (including having the menu bar at the top of the screen) and it all works without needing to recompile a program. The reason for that is that the requirements for the user interface elements an OS provides are the same for each OS. For example; it is not like a file is different on Linux, OSX and Windows. On every OS a file is stored in a directory so it has a path, filename and properties. Such an interface is easy to abstract. And in a way wxWidgets (and likely QT too) is doing exactly what you are proposing: have a core functionality (UI workflow) and use GUI specific solutions for the given OS. On the wxWidgets website it says: wxWidgets gives applications a truly native look and feel because it uses the platform's native API rather than emulating the GUI. PS: Yes, I know I'm harping on about wxWidgets a lot. It's just that I'm very intimately familiar with this cross platform framework and have used it for many projects with great success. My comments are probably true for Qt as well. |
| SiliconWizard:
To get back on topic, an interesting corollary of the Ikea effect may also be what nctnico is kind of showing here: you may tend to stick to something you have used a lot in the past, even if you haven't designed it yourself. I think it's kind of similar, in that it reflects the investment you've put into it. |
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