Skinnability and Choice
Charles Miller has some interesting thoughts on skins:
I consider skinnability to be a good reason to not use a program. Skinnability almost always means complete lack of standard controls, and useability that as been viciously compromised just so that some 13 year old boy can more easily graft on a bunch of stuff he scanned from an H.R. Giger calendar.
Go read the whole thing, especially the link above - it's a well thought out rant....
Comments
Re: Skinnability and Choice
[alan knight] June 1, 2003 13:23:49.706
While less drastic, wouldn't making an application that runs cross-platform have many of the same issues?
Cross-Platform UI
[Charles Miller] June 1, 2003 19:20:22.094
Yes, it applies doubly for cross-platform UI, because you're not only fighting the set of available widgets, you're fighting the layout expectations of all the different platforms you want to deploy on: http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/archives/001323.html
Skins
[Sames] June 2, 2003 14:08:48.611
I don't want to hear why this is yet another good reason to NOT do native widgets in VisualWorks :)
Re: Skins
[James Robertson] June 2, 2003 14:44:22.411
Comment on Skins by James Robertson
IMHO, All this does is point out that native widgets, while desirable, are not a panacea. TAANSTAAFL