Discussion

Barn Lab

Sharlin: Yeah, weird-shaped windows are definitely not something that should make a comeback. Just because you could doesn't mean you should.> Today, all Windows desktop apps look the same as they are the same; they are all built on crap React, Electron, electronbun, and Tauri browser wrappers that mimic the real Desktop apps.Desktop apps should look the same because they should use the OS GUI framework; that has nothing to do with React and Electron. I can't quite understand this argument; being webview based enables applications to look different from each other, like websites do, not similar. If they still do look similar, that's a good thing.> The point was usually not usability. It was identity.Yeah. And usability is sort of a big deal. Applications that implement their own widgets or color schemes or nonstandard shapes usually pay zero attention to usability or accessibility. They lack all the standard affordances and disregard all the standard UX guidelines.Also, ironically the applications with the most "identity" today tend to be control panels and other accessories by HW manufacturers bundled with device drivers, and they also happen to be the crappiest, most terrible bloatware that an average user is likely to encounter.

ahartmetz: > Win32 does not revolve around an update loop you own while (GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0) > 0) { TranslateMessage(&msg); DispatchMessage(&msg); } ...How much more could you own it, really? Is that the LLM talking?

tdeck: > The point was usually not usability. It was identity.Is it bad that when I read that I immediately thought "this was written by an LLM."

mauriciolange: Absolutely, same feeling here. But I also see that the author wanted to say something, and finally he manages: it begins as a rant (generated by a prompt of course) the goes to some examples that are entertaining, at least making me remember how I did some things in the past.

creshal: > The point was usually not usability. It was identity.And we're not even getting usability out of it! Each of those bland react-angles is subtly inconsistent with the OS, with each other, and very often, itself. And in 6 months everything will move around again, for no reason other than to keep the responsible managers employed, without improving UX. And a11y is crying in a corner somewhere, forgotten.

hnthrowaway0315: I don't know. They look cool. If someone wants to bring them back it's a viable option. I'd definitely welcome it.

okanat: > freaking memory is 77% full when freaking Windows 11 starts up.Unused memory is wasted memory. 77% is basically caches + private process memory + shared memory. Unless you are comparing by the private committed working set, you usually have no idea of the actual usage. .Net apps and browsers often allocate overcommitted memory to avoid making system calls.I get it, using browsers for ToDo apps is slow, however measuring their impact is harder than you think. At the same time the best x-platform UI framework is the browser. Qt comes next but it lacks man-decade amount of fixes/polishing to match native font support and text rendering, media handling, accessibility support, hw acceleration and memory pressure behaviors of Skia and Chromium.

donatj: I am reminded of how the CD burning app Disco for Mac would actually smoke while your disc was burning. Standard looking Window but with semitransparent smoke billowing out the top. If I recall, Steve Jobs showed it off on stage and loved it.

itmitica: Talking about choice. The article is presented in non-avoidable dark mode. Enough already! Say it with me: dark mode does not directly reduces the brightness, which should be your main concern, it only masks the brightness, which is BAD!

iamcalledrob: Personally, I find that any Windows application that is remotely polished will have its own win32 WindowProc anyway, even if written in higher-level tech.For example, if you want custom window controls, you need to use a WindowProc + WM_NCHITTEST to tell windows where the buttons are, so the OS can do things like display the window snapping controls when you hover over the "Maximize" button.Sidenote: as a designer, its disappointing how many Windows apps are subtly broken in a bunch of these ways. Its not that hard. "Modern" UI frameworks generally don't do this work for you either, there's a real lack of attention to detail.

gyomu: I think those observations get to the crux of the issue:> That is why weird shaped windows are easy to prototype and expensive to polish.> But there is an issue with Win32 API programming. And the truth is that custom windows mean doing everything yourself, controlling every Windows message, and that is fragileSoftware used to be made by small teams (often of 1). Once released it could be expected to be stable for years.The priorities have shifted to software that can be built and iterated on quickly, by large teams with high turnover. It’s not uncommon for popular software to get updated weekly, daily.I suspect this is also why skeuomorphic design lost the evolutionary race - everything needs to be tweaked and aligned and optimized ad hoc. If you want to reorganize the interface, it means potentially recreating a lot of assets. Flat design is interchangeable and modular.These trends will only get stronger with agentic software engineering - the incentives reward scale and speed.This is also why we don’t really see large ornate hand carved wooden funiture anymore, it’s all flatpack particleboard now.

iamcalledrob: > But there is an issue with Win32 API programming. And the truth is that custom windows mean doing everything yourself, controlling every Windows message, and that is fragileThis isn't actually true though. You can delegate to the default window proc, and only customise what you want.Sure, if your window is now a triangle, you need to think about how resizing is going to work. But you don't need to re-implement everything from scratch -- only the defaults that aren't compatible with your new design.

tariky: This article brings some flashback from Winamp skinning days.Anyone else liked to skin they Winamp?

torgoguys: >A freaking notepad app takes almost 50mb in memory when equivalent NOTEPAD done in pure Win32 C takes [only] 1.8mb of memory.Kids these days! A full 1.8MB of memory for little more than a wrapper around an existing win32 multi-line text box control!(Note that I added the "[only]" in the quote above to make it clear what the author meant since the quote was ripped from context).

ZoomZoomZoom: I'm all for Win32, but those odd-shapes and custom skins were the precursors and the normalizing precedence for the current default mentality of "visual identity = branding" that's been killing desktop computing experience for years and is one of the reasons we have to endure reacts, electrons and multitude of half-baked widget libraries that consist of things looking like no particular control but all feature blurry text rendering, flaky accessibility, negative information density and their own special sets of bugs.Unless you're building a Blender or an Ardour or, I don't know, a trading platform or a game, an individualized GUI should be the last of your priorities.

pharrington: He means its about a message loop, as opposed to an update loop.

ahartmetz: The main loop of any GUI application is an event loop. You can't do that without using a platform API, and the platform API happens to be GetMessage() / TranslateMessage() / DispatchMessage(). There is nothing Win32 specific that somehow gives you less ownership of the main loop than you would have otherwise. If anything, it gives you more customization than most other platforms / frameworks by having three separate functions between which you can manipulate events.At best, what the article is trying to say is "This is a GUI application, so we need to handle user input and paint request events etc. Here is how that works in Win32:"

mark-r: I worked on Windows apps for many years. The problem is that the Win32 interface only really gets you 90% control. The hardest thing I've ever done was when our product manager decided that color theming our app was an essential new feature. That's when you find out that certain Windows features like scroll bars under certain conditions bypass the usual message loop completely, because they know they can get away with it. The part I remember most vividly was recreating the lowly MessageBox from scratch, because none of the internals of the system supplied one were exposed in a way that you could modify them.

hnthrowaway0315: Wow this could be painful, to try to recreate something from scratch. Would QT make it work?

iggldiggl: > Unused memory is wasted memory. 77% is basically caches + private process memory + shared memory.In simplified overviews, Windows counts file system caches (standby memory) as free (respectively available) memory, so if 77% of 32 GB is to be taken literally, it still sounds rather on the high side.

51Cards: I used to write a lot of native Windows corporate software in the 90's and 2000's and my standard login window was a floating draggable oval. Nothing else was oddly shaped but I did get a lot of comments on the oval login windows. It was a bit about being unique, marking my "style", and just because I could. I will add though in the 90's it did make me nuts when entire applications were wildly shaped and you had to figure out how to use them.

cachius: Also the 3 pane GIMP experience.

sumtechguy: It was more of you had to know where to grab control. It was not always clear.With some of them it was dead easy and you can do it on window creation.Others you had to hook it out by playing with the window params (SetWindowLong) and getting the underlying control and then changing it.Some controls had their own bespoke way where you would send messages to the control then it would take care of it.Some you would have to iterate over the control list that window controlled and change it.In some cases it was just such a pain you were better off making your own custom control window that was just a mashup of other controls that you could control.It was one part experimentation and one part reading the docs (if the control had it). Now if it was a built in windows control you were playing with. You had to take on the risk on windows version update the customization you did would break if you did non documented things.

mercwear: This reminds me of the mid to late 90's warez scene, all of the key crackers had neat interfaces like this.

Aardwolf: > A freaking notepad app takes almost 50mb in memory when equivalent NOTEPAD done in pure Win32 C takes 1.8mb of memory.1.8MB? I don't know how much it took on our 386 computer with 4MB RAM and windows 3.11, but hopefully not that much

reddalo: > that has nothing to do with React and ElectronNot only that, but I think that Electron leads to the opposite problem: all apps look and behave differently, they don't follow platform guidelines, they look out of place.

1313ed01: I never had a problem with that. I want a specific application to behave the same no matter where I run it. I do not want my muscle memory for how to use an application to be confused by an application not looking or behaving the way I am used to when moving to a different platform.Of course all the applications bundled with a specific OS should be designed to work the same and work well together. It still makes sense to have guidelines and standard widgets in a system. But I prefer very much any third-party multi-platform app to be identical everywhere I run it.Not to defend Electron. There are many native frameworks that work the way I prefer, looking the same across platforms.

ghighi7878: You're thinking of apps for work. There's no reason why people should not be able to have fun when not working

rbanffy: > Desktop UI culture shifted from “look at this crazy skin” to “work reliably and get out of my way.”I miss the wobbly windows I had in Linux when we started playing with Compiz.Or neko on my Sun machines.As for weird-shaped windows, I think it is about ergonomics. A different shape requires more thinking to operate. Form should follow function, not the other way around - if the odd shape serves a purpose, then it makes sense. If it's just to show off, or to make the app look different, then it becomes a usability issue.

dspillett: > they don't follow platform guidelinesI don't think platform guidelines that anyone listens to have been a real thing for a long time. Even between apps released by MS there is little or no consistency at times, things that should be part of standard OS provided chrome like title-bars are a random mess - good luck guessing what has input focus sometimes, particularly with multiple monitors, as you unlock or switch vdesktop, without clicking to make sure.I keep thinking of writing something that detects the top-most app window and draws an obvious box around it.

AlexandrB: > I suspect this is also why skeuomorphic design lost the evolutionary race - everything needs to be tweaked and aligned and optimized ad hoc. If you want to reorganize the interface, it means potentially recreating a lot of assets. Flat design is interchangeable and modular.Another way to say this is: cost cutting. We gave up superior usability so software could be made more cheaply. See also: replacing buttons and knobs in cars with a big iPad.

electroly: My memory from the old days is you can use Win32 hooks to modify the MessageBox. HCBT_CREATEWND gets you the HWND of the MessageBox, and you can subclass it (in the Win32 sense) to insert your own WndProc. Then you're off to the races--it's your dialog now.

m_gloeckl: >> I keep thinking of writing something that detects the top-most app window and draws an obvious box around it.I would use this in a heartbeat. With Windows 10/11 I usually have the option to apply a garish accent color to the active window active. Nowadays, more and more apps don't use native window frames anymore, so that option works less and less.The W11 task bar with its barely legible indicators doesn't help either.On a big ultra-wide display with a few windows open, I sometimes struggle to see which one is active.

rickcarlino: Sonique media player, Trillian messenger and NeoPlanet web browser. I was there, man. Before flat UI and sensible color schemes took hold. For a moment, it was pretty wild.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillian_(software)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeoPlanethttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_(media_player)

csande17: [delayed]

tdeck: [delayed]

patwolf: It reminds me a bit of one of the reasons Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes didn't catch on. It's difficult to make rectangular furniture work efficiently in a non-rectangular space. Likewise, it's difficult to efficiently use a non-rectangular window on a rectangular monitor.

oorza: They're becoming more popular in Florida, as a poured concrete geodesic dome is basically immune to a hurricane.

LastTrain: This is bringing back some horrible memories. When product wants your app to have a slide-out that looks like a paper scroll...

herf: I think HiDPI is another reason - these were from the "96 DPI" era where pixels looked the same on every screen. You can draw all your pixel art at 2x (or 3x) and scale it down at load time, but it's not super easy. Also, some of the RAM usage of modern apps is the need for a full backing store for each window - in the "true" win32 days like Windows 95, XP, or Win7 in classic mode, you'd be drawing directly to the front buffer, with no extra RAM/VRAM usage per pixel. Of course it flickered and looked bad, but it was fast and cheap.

ecshafer: I wish Skeuomorphism returned. I like that these apps were cool and distinct. They were also running in way less memory than electron apps.

DoctorOW: Here's the thing, you absolutely can do this in exactly the same way: Make the background transparent and draw within the bounds. You can argue about whether or not you should, but that is the argument. There's no technical limitation.https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/custom-windo...

scottlu2: Minor trivia: the original motivation for adding SetWindowRgn was for Microsoft Bob characters and speech bubbles.

VerifiedReports: Not to mention that the statement is wrong. Windows applications do NOT look the same, and that's bad.Oh... except for their lack of a title bar, which prevents you from telling which application you're looking at. Is this PDF open in Edge, or Acrobat? Who knows. The windows look the same.Beyond that... it's a disgraceful mess. You have applications now with no menu bar, but instead a bunch of hamburger buttons and "gear" buttons scattered all over the place. And common, standard features are further hidden behind "more" labels even in THOSE menus.Another example of Windows's galling regression: the abolition of the File dialog in many apps, which have replaced it with a giant page of crudely-drawn, unlabeled, super-wide text boxes and a bunch of plain text. There's no file structure shown, so you have no idea where you are about to save a file... It's truly a clinic on dogshit UI. Pathetic.

jasomill: I don't, though I still have fond memories of olwm, AfterStep, and WindowMaker, as well as the NEXTSTEP 3.3 GUI running on greyscale NeXT hardware fished out of a dumpster behind the Indiana University School of Journalism in the late '90s following a hot tip from a friend who worked for university IT (as well as NeXT tech support who graciously sent me a full OS media kit free of charge so I could actually use it).

peteforde: From what I understand, there's now a substantial stack of Windows app frameworks from Win32 to MFC and then 4-6 others that came after. There was a good post covering this last month: https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/03/13/microsoft-hasnt-had-...The addition of frameworks like Qt and yes, web wrappers certainly complicates things unless you're presumably deep in it.What isn't clear to me is whether Win32 is still technically a viable choice for "modern" Windows 10/11 development. In other words, could you submit a Win32 app to the Microsoft Store, if that was something you felt like doing?

toast0: > What isn't clear to me is whether Win32 is still technically a viable choice for "modern" Windows 10/11 development. In other words, could you submit a Win32 app to the Microsoft Store, if that was something you felt like doing?I believe so, although originally the store required other toolkits, they changed thier mind.That said, I don't think it's very important for windows programs to come from the microsoft store... the limitations are not worth the market, especially since the store is unreliable: at least in my experience, the installation can get messed up and it won't self repair, and then you can't install new software... Why would you want to support that, when you could just provide a downloadable installer and license keys? (And tell people the sequence to escape store only mode)

peteforde: Don't get me wrong; I absolutely refuse to use the store.I'm just not deep enough in this to know the correct terminology. What I think I'm trying to ask is whether Win32 is still considered viable / equal opportunity compared to something built with, for example, WinForms. (To pick a name I remember.)From the outside, all of this churn makes me completely understand why web wrappers are so popular.

Dwedit: Even a minimal Hello World program (1.5KB executable) takes 340K of active private working set, and 552K of commit size. Windows just don't allow programs to use any less memory than that. You're bound by what the system libraries allocate (either statically or dynamically).Once you create a window, even if you haven't drawn that window, your minimum is now around 500KB.

Dwedit: You can modify this stuff if you go deep enough and are willing to detour the native Win32 API functions. Some things implemented in User32.dll don't make the appropriate API calls back to other User32.dll functions, and you need to detour Win32U.dll instead.

ConceptJunkie: Companies like IBM and Microsoft did a lot of HCI research back in the 80s, and made a lot of progress with usability and common idioms that all software followed. Then when displays with 256 or more colors became common, all that went out the window.All those Windows Media Player skins were awful because they used so much screen real estate on dead space. Whereas the plethora of Winamp skins kept the economy of screen real estate while still providing unique and imaginative visuals.The whole skeuomorphic trend starting in the mid-90s was similarly awful for the same reason. First, it was often hard to tell what was a control and what was just decoration. Second, it often took trial and error to figure out what was what. And, as I mentioned above, these designs almost inevitably wasted huge chunks of screen space on decoration that provided no functionality.Of course, we have the opposite problem now. All windows look the same. Title bars are mostly gone. And since companies like Microsoft replaced all their HCI experts with art-school dropouts who think the "flat" look with low contrast is cool, not only can you not tell what app you're looking at. Half the time you can't even tell where one window stops and another starts.The only good UI thing that's come out of the last decade or two is a near universal support for "dark mode". Otherwise, I would greatly prefer the Windows 2000 "classic" look, or something similar.

VerifiedReports: I agree with your sentiments, but not your timeline. The mid-'90s was the high point for GUIs, with Windows 95 nailing it pretty much across the board.And as you note, "flat" design is NO design. It's total dereliction of the design task. Fortunately we're seeing some steps back toward legitimate GUI, where controls are occasionally demarcated as controls.A great example of Windows's pathetic regression is "dark mode." Since the early '90s (and I mean '91 or '92), you could set up a system-wide color scheme. Inverse color schemes were an unfortunate vestige of the late '80s, early '90s... the advent of the Mac, "desktop publishing," and the effort to make the screen an analog for a piece of paper. That analogy fails.The result was millions of people reading black text off the surface of a glaring light bulb all day, every day. The first thing I did was set up a charcoal theme in Windows, pretty much exactly what all the "dark" schemes are today. And all properly written applications inherited it and all was good.So... just in time for people to realize that this was the way, Microsoft REMOVED the color-scheme editor from windows. Only to have to hastily slap a hard-coded "dark mode" back onto the OS. So damned stupid.

ChoGGi: I'd rather weird windows everywhere than material design everywhere.

mark-r: But it wasn't just one window, there were lots of controls on that window and the relationship between them wasn't as obvious as you'd assume. Trust me, recreating the whole thing from scratch was easier.The fun part was making a C++ class that could build up an in-memory dialog template. You had to do it that way because it was dynamically sized based on the message you displayed and the buttons you needed. If you used the default colors, you might be able to tell they were different if you squinted but you wouldn't know which was mine and which was Microsoft's.

mark-r: I honestly don't know if Qt would have made it any easier. But this was a large and old app that relied on Win32 at its core, and nobody was going to accept rewriting it for just one feature. Plus our customers were very time sensitive, and anything that could have slowed it down by a few ms was off the table.

eviks: It would help if you had seething more specific to say about usability rather than blindly defending the bland conformity: for example, if your music player app looks like your physical old round CD music player, not a rectangle, how exactly does it hurt usability?> Applications that implement their own widgets or color schemes or nonstandard shapes usually pay zero attention to usability or accessibility.OS are close to this, pick any era of the constantly changing OS color schemes and widget design, and you'll find plenty of issues, with the basics of the basics - readability - suffering.So again, why should everyone be generically bad just because they wrote the "guidelines"? Sure, change doesn't mean good, but the neither does using the defaults

reddalo: Yes, Liquid Glass is atrocious and it's the reason why I'm not going to buy a new Mac.

hnthrowaway0315: It's different. Electron apps all look the same without actually making much efforts to make them "personal" -- they just want to release an app ASAP so they chose Electron.On the other hand, the Win32 era "skins" like they ones used in Video Player and Winamp are very personal -- they have distinct styles. Maybe we don't like the styles, but at least they are trying to make a unique taste.Electron apps do not have tastes. Unless you count flat design + as little UI as possible as a taste.Modern operating systems are for servers, for corporations. They are not personal. Linux was for hackers and sysadmins then, not power users, and for servers now. Linux does make a come back for desktop because Windows team makes such a herculean effort to trash its own product. The Win 3.1 - Win XP era are the real "personal" era.

pjmlp: If I want to release a native app ASAP, I would chose .NET, Delphi, C++ Builder, Qt,...If it has to be Web stack, it would be hosted somewhere and delivered as a proper Web application.

hnthrowaway0315: I think they want an app, but prefer to use web stack, so that's the result. The reason they want an app instead of a web application, is maybe an app gives them more control.

sumtechguy: > This isn't actually true though. You can delegate to the default window proc, and only customise what you want.Yeah that was my memory of doing this stuff. You basically just added what you wanted to the case statement (or other hooks depending on your framework). Then dump the rest onto the default proc. The default 'wizards' usually made the standard petzold structure for you and you didnt even really have to think much about it. Now if you were doing everything by yourself just make sure you read the docs and make sure you call the default in the right cases.

iamcalledrob: The docs are great too.Of course absolutely ancient, but once you learn how to read them, they're very comprehensive.And the 3rd party content written about win32 is pretty evergreen. I regularly find articles written in the '90s that are helpful today. The beauty of an incredibly stable API, and documentation written before everyone had the internet.Just like the frontend dev ecosystem. Wait...

dspillett: > > I keep thinking of writing something that detects the top-most app window and draws an obvious box around it.> I would use this in a heartbeat.I may one day get around to it. Of the many projects on my “will probably never actually happen” list¹ it is one of the smallest. I did something similar to add other decorations to windows back in my just-post-Uni days². Walking the process list, getting the hWnd(s) you were interested in, and for there the window dimensions, was fairly trivial and it no doubt still is.----[1] I mention them here where relevant, in the hopes that someone else will see the ideas and be inspired to implement the them in an open form so I don't have to :-)[2] ~win2000 era, I was playing in Delphi at the time

pjmlp: Which gives the worse of both.Web development has been part of my life, on and off, since around 1998, and I never shipped browsers inside applications, not even during MSHTML glory days.Either proper application, or delivered to the already installed browser.I even refused a job offer where that was going to be part of it, some Electron like thingy.

netrap: Is it not the fact that Win32 is not the dominant platform anymore? It would be mobile phones now, right?

hnthrowaway0315: Nowadays true native app work is very limited and many companies just use Electron. Oh well.

pjmlp: Yes, because anything WinRT has been messed up, it was going well between Windows 8 and Project Reunion, as it was progressively getting feature parity with Win32, then everything went downhill and you can safely ignore anything from Microsoft marketing related to WinUI/WinAppSDK.It was so bad that on BUILD 2024, WPF regained its official status out of deprecation.So, Win32 (+ COM, most new APIs since Vista are COM based), Forms, and WPF, or oldie MFC, if on Microsoft own stacks.Otherwise Delphi, FreePascal, C++ Builder, Qt, Avalonia, Uno if going 3rd party.You can deploy any of them to the store.

peteforde: Well, that's clear as mud.Don't get me wrong; I actually appreciate the breakdown. It just makes me not want to even consider native Windows development. This is definitely an example of too many choices being a very bad thing.