Back when I wrote the comment, I tried to make clear that there were two very important and very contradictory requirements :
1. it has to look and behave the same way everywhere (because we don't want to have to retrain users when they switch platform, to maintain several documentation and marketing materials, and because we want to respect the designer's esthetic vision, and / or corporate graphical vision)
2. It has to look and behave native everywhere (because we don't want to confuse users of any given platform.)
Again : of course, I know they're contradictory ! If you have a sword to cut that knot, go for it !
And of course you're perfectly allowed to value requirement 2 more than requirement 1.
And sadly here, different user's interests are not aligned with different software producer's interests, so we're basically not going to please everyone.
Again, I have neither data, nor religion, nor solution about this.
As someone who switches between mac, windows and linux many times over the course of a week, the more similar a given app is across platforms, the more likely I am to choose that app for a given task. There are some low hanging fruit you can do for cross-platform support (menus in particular), but I'm going to prefer same-app to same-app experience beyond that for the most part.
Not particularly fond of the UWP paradigm either. For the most part, Linux and Windows versions of apps line up, but the controls may not match, but even MS programs in windows don't align.
More and more, I'm preferring the MS (Whatever the name of the day) and Google (Material Design) approaches for inside the app, with either an integrated or global menu as appropriate for the platform. With the rest in-app experience with a clean UX.
Again, I understand the desire, but most windows programs, in particular MS generational applications, already have disparate user interfaces.
It could be useful, but at least a bit of funny, if cross-platform apps would offer every platform flavor for every platform. So you would have, for example, a Linux, a macOS and a Windows option for each platform. A 3x3 matrix of options. Also quite a hard problem and a maintenance nightmare.
Electron, as critically as I see it, seems to make a pretty good compromise.
The UIs can be styled and modified to an app author's liking, but unspecified properties fall back to the operating system defaults (assuming the Chrome developers did their jobs well).
Comments
Back when I wrote the comment, I tried to make clear that there were two very important and very contradictory requirements :
1. it has to look and behave the same way everywhere (because we don't want to have to retrain users when they switch platform, to maintain several documentation and marketing materials, and because we want to respect the designer's esthetic vision, and / or corporate graphical vision)
2. It has to look and behave native everywhere (because we don't want to confuse users of any given platform.)
Again : of course, I know they're contradictory ! If you have a sword to cut that knot, go for it !
And of course you're perfectly allowed to value requirement 2 more than requirement 1.
And sadly here, different user's interests are not aligned with different software producer's interests, so we're basically not going to please everyone.
Again, I have neither data, nor religion, nor solution about this.
Number one is more hubris than requirement.
As someone who switches between mac, windows and linux many times over the course of a week, the more similar a given app is across platforms, the more likely I am to choose that app for a given task. There are some low hanging fruit you can do for cross-platform support (menus in particular), but I'm going to prefer same-app to same-app experience beyond that for the most part.
On the other hand as someone who uses Windows 99% of the time i prefer applications to look and behave like regular Windows applications.
(note: despite the name and origin, i do not consider UWP as regular Windows applications and i want them to die in fire)
Not particularly fond of the UWP paradigm either. For the most part, Linux and Windows versions of apps line up, but the controls may not match, but even MS programs in windows don't align.
More and more, I'm preferring the MS (Whatever the name of the day) and Google (Material Design) approaches for inside the app, with either an integrated or global menu as appropriate for the platform. With the rest in-app experience with a clean UX.
Again, I understand the desire, but most windows programs, in particular MS generational applications, already have disparate user interfaces.
It could be useful, but at least a bit of funny, if cross-platform apps would offer every platform flavor for every platform. So you would have, for example, a Linux, a macOS and a Windows option for each platform. A 3x3 matrix of options. Also quite a hard problem and a maintenance nightmare.
Electron, as critically as I see it, seems to make a pretty good compromise.
The UIs can be styled and modified to an app author's liking, but unspecified properties fall back to the operating system defaults (assuming the Chrome developers did their jobs well).