Matisyahu's Blog

End of another week and stat of a new one. I have to admit over the last couple of weeks I’ve been pretty lazy but what I’m hoping is that with the start of a new week that I’ll get back on track again. I’ve meal prepped my chia seed breakfast today for the next couple of days although I am looking at heading to the supermarket on Monday or maybe Tuesday to pick up some Greek Yoghurt to pair up with that along with some bottles of Pepsi Max if they’re available.

A new Window insider build was made available (link) and they’ve expanded dark mode to the run dialogue box. I was watching a video on YouTube and someone was unhappy it was taking too long to get dark mode available. I originally thought that maybe it had to do with them re-writing the dialogues in XAML however i have a feeling that it may have more to do with them integrating the common controls and dialogues into the Windows App SDK to take advantage of the framework so when you change the theme in a XAML/Windows App SDK application that the theme is automatically inherited by all UI components. Long story short, I think long term they’re wanting to move things over to Windows App SDK but in the mean time to get the results quicker they’re probably doing something not as radical. It’ll be interesting to see when these improvements make their way to the mainstream release of Windows 11.

As I’ve said in the past, the reason why things are more coherent in macOS resulting in a consistent UI experience when dark mode was made available was because in macOS 10.6 the Finder was re-written in Cocoa with the move to a pure 64bit operating system. It would be no different than if Microsoft re-wrote the whole Windows Shell using Windows App SDK which makes use of XAML with the end result being a consistent experience. The problem is that unlike Apple, Microsoft doesn’t have the luxury of being disruptive because their biggest customer’s aren’t Joe and Jane Smith but are large enterprise customers running tens of thousands of desktops whose organisations depend on knowing that disruptions are kept to a minimum so that employees can be productive.

It is always interesting to see how the platform is developing around the Windows Runtime environment – gradually building it up over releases and although as a user I am impatient I also understand that you want to make sure that when you design the framework to meet the needs of the target audience rather than designing, implementing and then realising that what you have created is great for what you do internally but fails to meet the needs of third party developers who will rely on it. I guess it is one of those things of moving the platform forward in a careful and considered way – ensuring their is progress with minimal disruption.