"yeah, he was a really great guy, really gave back to the people who worked for him." CBC about a guy who fought to keep minimum wage down so he didn't have to pay people a living wage while raking in billions in oil and gas profits.
@jeromechoo singular devs or small teams of programmers maintaining projects. The goal is usually to get it working and not fuss too much about the UI/UX.
When we think of polished, commercial software, there’s usually a designer, a product lead, devs and a whole infrastructure behind it. FOSS is way more ad hoc.
I think a good counter-example is the indie app developer. There are a bunch of great, well-designed mobile apps built by solo devs or small teams.
@jeromechoo another possibility is cross platform development is hard, and most projects pick an existing cross platform toolkit for their UI. Most of them look kind of funky compared to a natively built app.
@jeromechoo I was thinking more about cross platform desktop apps, but that looks cool. Apollo was a great app and @christianselig deserves a lot of props for what he built.
I hadn’t seen Voyager before. Looks like a cool project. Also guessed it was React Native before I looked at the source. Ironically, I think there are more XP mobile toolkits than there are desktop ones these days. Building something that looks good on macOS and Windows and Linux is hard.
@pheonix@jeromechoo I think it's more than just money. A well designed app is designed first and implemented to a spec. Then iterated on with the help of the designer and product folks. It's more than just UI, it's about the whole workflow and interaction. The "experience".
Not a lot of open source projects start with that design mentality up front. Some devs are better at design than others, but it's a rare developer that can do it all themselves.
Now that the ads in the Windows 11 start menu are now available I actually think the coverage missed the mark.
This is less a cash grab by Microsoft and more of a way to help the few developers still making Windows apps to get distribution.
Getting developers to still care about building Windows apps has been an ongoing challenge since the advent of the web and then smartphone apps. This seems mainly a way to both incentivize developers and connect users to apps.
@carnage4life interesting take. It doesn't help that MSFT hasn't really shipped a comprehensive desktop UI library that people want to use. MAUI is deficient in a lot of key areas, Xamarin was targeted more towards mobile dev. UWP is already deprecated and put to pasture.
There are no good native app solutions for Windows from MSFT.
