Joe Hewitt on What Longhorn Needs for Developers

Joe has a particularly dim view of where we’ve come with GUIs in the last 10 years. In fact, it’s much more dim than my own view. On the other hand, I think he nails one point:

“There is a core set of patterns that are repeated over and over in thousands of applications, each of which has their own subtly different behavior and visuals. Back and forward, undo and redo, delete, find, bookmark, etc… And there are a core set of graphical objects like images, text, maps, and calendars, which everybody has to reinvent every time they need one in their application, and they usually do a lousy job of reinventing it. Sure, there are classes for some of these things in GUI libraries, but the user doesn’t see that - they see the programmer’s personal interpretation of how they think it should look and work.”

As a app builder in my heart, I absolutely want the tools to build *good* applications, not just *pretty* applications.