Standard User Interfaces

July 21st, 2006

Why does it seem as if every single application these days decides it has to ignore the native look of Windows and come up with it’s own?

Instant Messaging Apps

Media Players

Media Players

iTunes, Songbird, Winamp also have non standard interfaces. I don’t have them installed so didn’t include them.

Gaming

 

Microsoft Office is another notable application which fails to implement a native look – 2003 is a strange colour and 2007 does away with menus.

Now I’m all for programs taking liberties and theming them to look better and I don’t believe the native look of the OS should stop this. But in almost all of these cases, the custom looks look worse than the my default Windows theme (Luna Element) and many of the custom UIs make the programs harder to use. 

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6 Responses to “Standard User Interfaces”

  1. # Sunny Boyon 21 Jul 2006 at 12:51 pm

    Don’t forget that Office 2007 and WMP 11 were designed for the Vista UI. On Windows Vista they feel pretty native – especially WMP 11.

  2. # Khloon 21 Jul 2006 at 12:57 pm

    Internet Explorer 7 too. The main annoying thing about IE7 is it maintains the Vista look n’ feel and uses Vista back/forward buttons rather than XP Luna ones. The Vista buttons look pretty bad on XP. 

  3. # Jasidogon 21 Jul 2006 at 3:22 pm

    Agree completely this stuff does my head in. I like a consistant look across all applications. One of the things I admire about the mac platform. If I want as flashy style I’ll want that system/application wide. 

  4. # Clearon 21 Jul 2006 at 5:13 pm

    Yeah, none standard themes are rather annoying. Maybe software developers could have none standard as default style but also code the option to have standard theming which will use the windows theme?

  5. # Xeenon 21 Jul 2006 at 11:38 pm

    Because it’s easier to write such applications. Imagine you have to check that it works with all fonts, font sizes, color combinations, … instead of just having a background image or fixed font or whatever. Imagine someone uses a larger font the devs might have to implement a word wrap method in order to break the text properly if it gets too wide. They need to compute a new minimal width (may depend on app though) in order to ensure that e.g. no buttons get cropped instead of just defining a fixed width. Larger images may be needed because a small image (e.g. magnifier icon) in a huge text box looks stupid and stretching the icon makes it look bad/pixlated.

    This applies for many "native" and ported apps (consider Quicktime and WMP11/IE7 as ported), however of course there are exceptions (e.g. Yahoo Messenger which only has its own title bar without any further "real" skinning).

    Having a custom themed app makes it look more important as well – that is, if it’s the only or one of the few skinned apps. It’s like visiting standard web pages all the time and suddenly you come across this one, super special designed webpage. It’s more likely that you’ll talk about this one better than other, or at least remember it. 

    xeen 

  6. # The Wolfon 25 Jul 2006 at 9:46 am

    This is why I love Gnome (or KDE),for IM I have Gaim, for Music I have Rhythmbox, for everything I need I have a Gtk based program that fits right in.

    Well, for nearly everything, because there are no games for Linux that require steaming piles of crap..

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