Ask HN: What's the best UI creation method of all time?
I'm doing some research on the various ways application UIs have been created ever since computers have been capable of displaying windows. What I would like to know is, what's your favorite and why? Feel free to name any UI creation method you personally enjoy, whether it be for mobile, desktop, the web or something else. It can also be from any time period. Were you a fan of NewS? Adobe Flash/Flex? Some obscure web framework nobody's ever heard of? Tell me why it tickles your fancy.
10 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 37.6 ms ] threadSure, 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.
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.
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.
(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!)
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.