GUIs
Cameron Hunt and Marco Arment don’t like cross-platform graphical user interfaces, because they work, well, the same cross-platform.
While I applaud the effort to get into the heart of matters without pussyfooting around (“I don’t like cross-platform GUIs because of their cross-platform-ness”), I have no idea why they would say so. Especially, as people who have ever developed anything for the web knows, when making something work across platforms is such a pain in the ass.
I think I’ll take a GUI that is inferior to a native one any day over no application at all, which is what we’d get if developers abandoned all attempts at cross platform libraries. Many, many programs, whose developers either are volunteers who work by the scratch-your-damn-itch-yourself-if-you-want-it-scratched principle, or those developed by people who work by the I’ll-scratch-your-itch-when-you-prove-it’s-profitable principle, would not work at all on Windows or Linux if they were developed for OS X, they wouldn’t work on Windows or OS X if developed for Linux, and so on.
What is nice is when developers successfully apply good software practices and modularize enough that people can easily glue together the pieces and build their own native GUI if they so desire.
This is the first time I’ve ever read anyone seriously suggest that they have something against platform independent GUIs in general. What curious times.
