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Desktop-flavored GUI's still king of the office, let's standardize it

4 points by tabtab ↗ HN
The prediction that mobile would kill off the office desktop was pretty much wrong. Sure, there are ancillary mobile services, but the brunt of office work is done on desktops.

Desktop-like GUI's are still the pinnacle of productivity for typical office use. They also created an established standard that mobile-influenced UI's kicked in the gonads with screwy deviations.

Mice are simply superior to the average finger: right-clicking, roll-over pop-up text, precision, less need for borders around widgets, etc. And GUI's take better advantage of medium and large screens.

What's needed is a state-ful GUI markup standard so that Microsoft has real GUI competition. It would be kind of like dynamic XAML. JavaScript emulation of GUI's has proven problematic such that the standard should encourage directly supported GUI idioms.

4 comments

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[dead] codevark
Standardize the underpinnings, mechanism, whatever, but allow the user to make the GUI their own. On my 1990's Amiga, I can have a single icon that covered the entire screen if I wanted. (Why? Because I can? hehe) Still more customizable than anything I've seen since (unless you use some sort of third party thing like Talisman on windows, etc.) Sure, there are workstations that might be used by multiple people, in those cases lock the GUI down to something usable by all. But don't lock down everything to some committee's idea of "productive". JMHO :)
desktopninja
I'd welcome back that windows 2000 GUI any day. clear, concise and consistent
tabtab
Do you mean the operating system's tools, or application design style? I'm mostly focusing on CRUD application development, and perhaps design tools (graphics, CAD, documents, image processing, etc.). Web "standards" (cough) stymied CRUD and design tools.
desktopninja
Many of the programs at that time used the OS's default window styling and controls. So this made the desktop experience feel uniform throughout.