A program I'd written once got chastised by a young developer: he found it oldfashioned, "not of this time". After some asking about what he meant, I found out his main gripe was that the GUI controls like listviews, tabs, buttons etc. didn't look like the 'aero' styled ones you see in Windows Vista and 7٭. When I invited him to reimplement part of the program according to his taste, he made a start but quickly chickened out as he realized how much work had to be done in the background to make the GUI support the user instead of the developer.
٭) The app's controls look simple and grayish like in Windows 2K. No color effects. No translucency. No skinning. This is an app that dozens of people use on a daily basis and it makes an effort to let them do things fast and accurate with the least chance of surprise and/or annoyance. No user of the app has complained to me yet about the lack of eye candy; they do appreciate snappy response times, tho ;-)
٭) The app's controls look simple and grayish like in Windows 2K. No color effects. No translucency. No skinning. This is an app that dozens of people use on a daily basis and it makes an effort to let them do things fast and accurate with the least chance of surprise and/or annoyance. No user of the app has complained to me yet about the lack of eye candy; they do appreciate snappy response times, tho ;-)