The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?
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@Parody said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
@Magus said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
@TwelveBaud said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
and most WPF apps looked like ass -- and rightfully so; only stuff like the museum exhibits I work on need a totally custom UI.
I shake my head every time this happens. A good WPF app does almost no customization of the UI. WPF is really good at really boring, generic apps.
There don't seem to be many good WPF applications out there, then. The major sales point of WPF was always making applications that don't look like Windows applications, thus throwing out all of your knowledge of how they should work. :(
Really? I always thought the main selling point was XAML.
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@Parody Yeah, just like there aren't many good web apps out there. Most good WPF apps, you'd never even think about what they're made in.
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@DogsB said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
Does anyone else remember when Amazon went completely touch controls for one iteration of the kindle and everyone wanted buttons back? Amazon's response? Haptic feedback response controls. That's the most fucking obtuse way of saying buttons you fucking mongoloids.
Fucking retards.
IIRC, before they brought back physical buttons (if they have at all, to check recent Kindle models) they had a worst-of-both-worlds solution which was a touch sensitive strip beside the screen.
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@Gąska said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
@Parody said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
@Magus said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
@TwelveBaud said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
and most WPF apps looked like ass -- and rightfully so; only stuff like the museum exhibits I work on need a totally custom UI.
I shake my head every time this happens. A good WPF app does almost no customization of the UI. WPF is really good at really boring, generic apps.
There don't seem to be many good WPF applications out there, then. The major sales point of WPF was always making applications that don't look like Windows applications, thus throwing out all of your knowledge of how they should work. :(
Really? I always thought the main selling point was XAML.
What do you think they do with the XAML, especially in
ExpressionBlend? It certainly isn't "use the system settings".
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@Magus said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
@Parody Yeah, just like there aren't many good web apps out there. Most good WPF apps, you'd never even think about what they're made in.
There is a lot of mystery meat and other bad design out there, sadly. :(
A lot of my objections come from developers, designers, and Microsoft itself focusing on theming applications and sacrificing navigation, readability, and system knowledge. Even the newer (WPF-based) Visual Studios have fallen to this, with none of the default themes taking their cues from the OS settings and cramming controls into every available space and such. 2019 is even taking the title bar away, though I saw a lot of complaints about that idea in the feedback.
I ended up naming my own custom VS theme "Less Stupid". It's not really any better than the ones that come with, but at least there's more contrast.
Even my basic "try out WPF" application defaults to doing something to the menu bar to add a vertical gradient to it, making the menu nearly impossible to read. Why? It doesn't look like that in the designer, and it doesn't happen to a similar WinForms app.
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@Parody said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
@Gąska said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
@Parody said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
@Magus said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
@TwelveBaud said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
and most WPF apps looked like ass -- and rightfully so; only stuff like the museum exhibits I work on need a totally custom UI.
I shake my head every time this happens. A good WPF app does almost no customization of the UI. WPF is really good at really boring, generic apps.
There don't seem to be many good WPF applications out there, then. The major sales point of WPF was always making applications that don't look like Windows applications, thus throwing out all of your knowledge of how they should work. :(
Really? I always thought the main selling point was XAML.
What do you think they do with the XAML
Native windows? At least all XAML code I've seen was native windows. And some Windows Phone 8 stuff, which I don't think we should count given its popularity, and it used stock system stuff anyway.
especially in
ExpressionBlend?I've seen this name in Start menu, but never used it, and don't know what it is, and don't know how much actual use it gets in real world, and don't want to guess one way or the other.
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@Gąska Blend is awful. It's supposed to be a tool for styling/building XAML applications. When I did a ton of WPF/Silverlight work back in the day, and worked with a graphic designer, too, we found it was much easier and saner to hand-write XAML in Visual Studio than to attempt to use the Blend design view, even for complicated styles or animations. I actually assumed Blend was discontinued at some point.
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@Gąska Blend, formerly known as Expression Blend when they were trying to pitch it as part of a suite for designers, is an editor similar to Visual Studio but with a focus on binding, timelining, and storyboarding rather than code. The main point was that it was similar to Flash and you could have your UI designer use that for all the fancy effects she wanted to do while you focused on the backend, and at the end of the day it was all C# and XAML so it all played nice together.
It pretty much isn't used anymore. Either the budget doesn't include a designer, or the designer balks at using anything but his pet favorite tool, and either way you end up having to do design yourself, which (naturally) you'd use Visual Studio to do.
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@Gąska said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
I've seen this name in Start menu, but never used it, and don't know what it is, and don't know how much actual use it gets in real world, and don't want to guess one way or the other.
As you can probably tell, the big thing I remember from the introduction of WPF was the focus on letting your art designers make the UI by using the Expression applications. The current Blend is what remains from those days.
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@stillwater said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
I've heard good things about UWP but no idea how many Line of Business applications are written in it.
Master Server and Chat Server are (foolishly) written in WPF.
I seek to remedy this when possible.
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@Parody said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
the big thing I remember from the introduction of WPF
Oh, I thought you're talking about real life.
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@Gąska said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
@Parody said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
the big thing I remember from the introduction of WPF
Oh, I thought you're talking about real life.
My real life (for Windows development) was MFC until the early 2010s and WinForms for a few years thereafter. WPF and XAML were these mythical things that nobody used. :)
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@Parody said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
Even my basic "try out WPF" application defaults to doing something to the menu bar to add a vertical gradient to it, making the menu nearly impossible to read. Why? It doesn't look like that in the designer, and it doesn't happen to a similar WinForms app.
Yeah... this stuff really bugs me. You can do all that stuff, and sometimes it's really useful, but it's so much better if you just don't.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
@stillwater said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
I've heard good things about UWP but no idea how many Line of Business applications are written in it.
Master Server and Chat Server are (foolishly) written in WPF.
I seek to remedy this when possible.
There's no reason not to do that with those, though...
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@Magus said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
@stillwater said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
I've heard good things about UWP but no idea how many Line of Business applications are written in it.
Master Server and Chat Server are (foolishly) written in WPF.
I seek to remedy this when possible.
There's no reason not to do that with those, though...
Aside from, there not really needing a UI at all (if programmed correctly)?
Literally, one is just a log text window, and the other is almost completely API driven and also doesn't need a UI (especially one that necessarily requires one-user-at-a-time, because Remote Desktop is not conducive to multiple users on one session without hacks).
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@Tsaukpaetra Fair... I'd do it as a library used by a console app and a UI app if it were me...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
Aside from, there not really needing a UI at all (if programmed correctly)?
Oh. I thought you were saying you should have made them UWP applications instead, which made me think "I'm not sure why, but whatever."
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@Parody said in The "but what does it do" effect: how often do you have trouble understanding what stuff does?:
I'm not sure why, but whatever
Accurately sums up my dayjob.