alt Hacker NewsI 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 fragile
Software 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.
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> skeuomorphic design
While the idea itself may hold water, all of the practical implementations I saw were just too visually busy and… just ugly tbh. I am glad we moved away from that.
It could probably be done better, but that would require lots of effort, as you said.
> 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.
> 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 fragile
This 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.