You’re absolutely right that Microsoft doesn’t enforce alot of what people think and neither does Apple. I think their developers just follow the standards because they’re there. I think if there were a cohesive linux standard that a majority of distributions adhered to it then more linux apps would follow it. Unfortunately too many distributions ignore the LSB and HFS in part or whole so even they aren’t as good as they could be.

I had some friends using the office2003 style but I’m not sure on the specifics. If I see them again I’ll ask but it should just be a matter of poking around in the right dlls.

Either way thanks for actually reading what I wrote.

So yes X11 provides nothing, and Windows provides somethings, so Windows wins, but I don’t care about who wins, I just wanted to point out to people that Windows looks consistent even though it doesn’t actually enforce it as much as people think. And it’s my opinion that this is because developers copy the MS Windows look, and because Windows provides fonts and colours.

You cannot use the Office 2003 style, well as far as I can tell. If you can then it’s a bit crazy that Borland clearly implemented their own version of it for the latest Delphi, and that Trolltech are planning the same thing for Qt (well so they implied at the Cambridge roadshow).

I’ve been a software developer for the last 16 years. All of that time I’ve used Dos/Windows, however 3 years ago I started exploring various unix environments (Solaris, Mac OS X, Linux), and I have to say you’re just plain wrong. Windows apps almost all have the system render things like menus, dialogs, and virtually all other controls. About the only thing most developers render themselves are document views.

Yes, windows media player is different but it’s not really that different it uses standard menus and controls and just hides them when they aren’t being used.

Office 2003 does have a new style but it’s a system style and any application can use it.

Which brings up another point that proves applications let the system render mostly everything. When new versions of windows come out and you run an old program it get’s the new decorations ,dialogs, menu styles, and controls.

Obviously developers can deviate from this standard and render windows in any shape they feel like and display controls however they choose. Things like winamp and firefox do this. Even this still uses a standard system api. That means that if a new version of windows needs to handle your wierd shaped window in a different way the system already has the change in place and you don’t need to update your program.

As for java applications sure they’ve got their own separate style that’s the point of java, much like the point of qt and the gnome themeing stuff (metacity maybe?). It ensures a consistent look and feel for that program wherever the program is run. It does exactly the opposite of what a window manager/decorator does.

@Micke
The reason the message is translated and the response isn’t is because the developer or translator didn’t do his/her job. The application supplies the message text and the system supplies the response text.

If you look at Windows carefully, this is mostly all that is consistent.

WRT API, Windows has a common font API, which means all the many, many higher level toolkits look the same. He seems to claim that everyone uses Win32 and that Win32 provides everything, which simply isn’t true, especially nowadays.

And WRT your first post, I can’t respect much of what you said seeing as you both didn’t read my post, and also didn’t show any impartiality in any of your feedback.

My tentative reaction is that you have some points, and I agree, although it had nothing to do with my blog post. However Windows is not as consistent as you think. Also I use OSX regularly and my GF does fulltime, we don’t agree with you that it is a very good UI experience. What Apple have is an eye for detail, but they often put form over function, and don’t always pick the best solution for a UI. I think what they generally achieve though is a better UI than most of the competition.

Anyway this topic is very depressing for me, I hoped for some intelligent debate, but all I got was a bunch of knee jerk reactions from a bunch of irrational fanboys.

Calm down, and start being helpful instead of a hindrance, because to be honest, your current attitude is pathetic and just gets in the way of those people who are actually contributing.

Sure there are differences in look and feel but the basics are always there:

a) Menus - all of them have at least File, Edit, View, Help menus in that order

b) Toolbars - if they have it there is a standard one with Open, Save, Print, etc buttons

c) Keyboard shortcuts - In Windows F1 is always Help while in Linux it can even do some horrible things depending on the application used, Ctrl+S is Save, Ctrl+O is Open, hopefully you get the idea

d) Common Dialogs - File, Print and Color picker are the same for all applications except perhaps for some ported ones which do not use system dialogs

e) Fonts - I can’t stress enough how much better font rendering looks in Windows and MacOS than in any Linux distro or desktop environment seen so far and I seen them all

Now to the point of consistency — if you think it is all about look and feel then you do not understand it at all. For people to be productive they have to be able to find things in the same place. People like order. If you want people to change from one flavor of something to another, you copy the interface, instead of designing a new one.

It is easy to prove this, just take a car, reverse the gas and brake pedals and see how many good drivers will be able to successfully drive such car.

Sure they will adapt but they will have to waste considerable time and effort, making the whole idea of transition to a new sistem mighty unpopular.

Moreover, changing the interface is justified only if it enables people to do more or to do it easier. Otherwise it is a waste of time and energy.

2. Who said freedom of choice?

Sure we all like the freedom of choice but face it — not all of us are smart enough to be given that freedom. People get confused by too many choices. You surely remember the story about a donkey which died from hunger because he couldn’t decide which haystack he liked more?

Same thing in Linux. You have Gnome and KDE. Both serve the same basic purpose — they let you launch applications, arrange files and windows. All other differences are unimportant for the user as long as that job is performed correctly. With that in mind why do we need two (or even more) desktop environments?

Compare latest Mac OS codenamed Leopard and Linux and observe the completely opposite philosophy:

- In Linux user has to be able to pick right download of the application he wants to use. First he has to chose between various CPU architectures, then he has to pick executable based on whether it has been linked to static or dynamic libraries, then the right toolkit for the desktop environment he uses and lastly if there is no prebuilt binary for his distribution he has to download source and to spend hours chasing library dependencies and compiling it. If the application is good, he will forget that unpleasant experience but if it is lousy (as most of them are) guess how many other applications he will bother to try?

- On the other side, on Mac you have universal binaries. With the advent of Leopard one executable can work on 32-bit and 64-bit platform no matter if it is powered by Power PC or Intel CPU. Moreover, there is only one GUI and the user is spared all the trouble I mentioned above.

Open source community is not recognizing this problem, instead it further magnifies it by splitting the existing well known projects. Consider the split of X Server. Now we have two X’s to pick from. That is not helping anyone.

I am a developer and I have used Windows for a long time, and I have tested most of the Linux distributions. After being through all that, if I had to chose beween paying for Windows, paying for Mac OS, and not having to pay a dime for Linux I would chose Mac OS. It is the only OS which is user-centric enough and which is developing in the right direction to deserve my effort of adapting to be able to use it.

If you try to analyze the situation by comparison, in the year 1998 you had DOS and Windows 98 GUI was sitting on top of it. You now have console with several shells and X server + XYZ desktop environments and window managers sitting on it and it is year 2006. You call that a progress? Well I don’t. So, like it or not, Linux still has a long way to go.