Bad UI of the Week: The Cross-Platform User Interface
There are two kinds of snake oil in the software world that still seem to sell well. The first is DRM, where purveyors seem able to convince their customers that they can provide something that has been shown to be impossible. The other is that cross-platform graphical user interface.
Designing a good user interface is hard. Designing one that works well on multiple platforms is almost impossible. Unlike DRM, it is theoretically possible to build a good cross-platform GUI toolkit. The amount of effort required, however, makes it practically impossible—and probably not worth the effort.
The biggest myth in cross-platform GUI development is that getting the look right is the most important thing. A few years ago, Red Hat announced with great glee that it had created the BlueCurve theme that would unify GNOME and KDE desktops by making applications from both look the same.
Previously, the different appearance of KDE and GNOME applications would provide users with a visual clue that they should expect different behavior. With BlueCurve, this visual clue was removed.
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