this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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How so? Do you mean that companies are allowed to customize their own apps now? Cuz with regular desktop frameworks it's pretty hard to do that (compared to web frameworks anyway). All apps end up looking the same.
Yes. That's literally the point. The more things look and behave as expected, the easier they are to use.
Of course these days that gets trumped by the desire to shove the corporate design everywhere.
I'm not sure limiting customization is actually a good thing... There are legitimate customizations and innovative inputs that people like.
For example, Logseq has a fancy text field that can bring up a submenu if you type two left brackets. Something like this is pretty specific to Logseq (or at least certain notes apps) and this would be much harder to replicate in a native app.
Or are you saying Logseq shouldn't do that? And it should assume that the notes area is just a plain text field? I guess that would be considered more "expected".
At least in my experience with Vala and GTK, this would take significantly more effort. Not impossible. Just way more effort.
You can absolutely have fancy UI elements that provide additional functionality. Most OSes don't have built-in 3D visualization widgets but that doesn't mean you can't write CAD software for them.
My point is that your custom widgets should make an effort to look and feel as much like native widgets as possible. Any skills the user has in using native widgets should carry over to your custom ones. So your custom text field should look and behave like a native one until the user types two left brackets. When they do, the menu that pops up should be a native menu or one designed to resemble one very closely.
Thanks to web-first development and lazy cross-platform UIs, standards in this regard have deteriorated to near-nothingness. Buttons don't have to look or even behave like anything else on any platform. It's perfectly reasonable to expect the user to relearn the UI for any application. Modern UIs spiritually follow in the footsteps of Bryce 3D rather than any Human Interface Guidelines. And that peeves me.
For all their faults, Apple got Mac users to have very high standards in this regard for quite some time, which led to a bevy of good-looking and approachable applications, at least until post-skeuomorphic macOS took care of the "attractive" part. The consistent UI across vendors was something I really liked back when I was a Mac user.
Not something I would consider terribly hard to implement, but it would depend on the toolkit. A function for getting the text in a textbox and a callback to alert you to the fact that the user is typing is something I would expect to find in any modern GUI toolkit.