Why are MOST windows apps so unaesthetically pleasing. (ugly)

[splodgeyrog]

Hello
This is not trying to insult anybody on this forum, but i would like to know,

Why it is that on Devices such as Iphone/Android, the apps look good, and are smooth, whereas on windowsmobile they often end up being ugly .

Obviously some are great on windows mobile, and run flawlessly,
however the majority of apps on the internet are unpleasing.

Take for example, towers of hanoi.
I know most will hate the game but oh well.

On the iphone, there are a few apps for towers of hanoi, this being an example
http://iphone.iusethis.com/screenshot/iphone/hanoi.png

Now here is the best one available for windows, NOTING IT IS A PAID APP COSTING £6.84
http://clickgamer.com/products/pid_19555/screenshots/ppc/large/product_descMain3.jpg


millions of apps are like this, where there is not a satisfactory wm6 equivilant. this is only 1 app i came across in day to day life .
Saying that, most inventive games on iphone dont even have a wm6 equivilant, satisfactory or not.

Please note, i do realize millions of useful apps not available on other platforms are available on wm6, TF3D etc.

However to me ,I am getting annoyed with the lack of nice games for wm6.

Will this change when the windows marketplace is opened properly?

[kosherpig]

Maybe because WM is designed mainly to be practical? If anyone wants to see gorgeous landscapes simply copy photos of 'em to your phone and view them, on, for example a VGA screen which is incomparable to shitty HVGA overiszed iPhones screen.
Want more games? Get yourself an emulator, for example SmartGear. It is paid, but (nearly) everything in iphone's app store is paid. After you get the emulator to work you get hundreds of games with excellent playability. But if you want inventions like:
a) pressing onscreen buttons and blowing into the mic to make sound
b) unlocking the screen by removing the simulated fog by your finger
c) game which is clever because its objective is to... press a button! yeah! The longer the better!
sorry, better get yourself an iPhone. If you managed to get this far and you don't want to kill me... wait for MS to designe the UI in a extra shiny finger friendly manner. Most likely developers will follow it.

[kareeem]

I actually think a lot of the apps look nice; they could've been nicer, however, i'd prefer function over "form." Also, one of the reasons they don't look very aesthetically pleasing is becasue a lot are .NET applications so they're just there to deliver what the programs offers.

[derekwilkinson]

Because it's more difficult...

[DRZ400]

Because most apps are written by hobbyist programmers and we're forced to use standard .NET controls.

Programming fancy graphics is incredibly difficult and time consuming.

[splodgeyrog]

not that i know anything about applications,,
but having to use .net controls sounds pretty shit.

Its just annoying that android and iphone have applications so far ahead of wm.
I think wm6 needs a complete redesign.
Even wm7 shots look dissapointing.

[krazy_about_technology]

One problem/strength of WM is that it is available running on a diverse range of hardware which is completely opposite to the i-will-ride-on-my-own-bicycle-only-:babycry: :D philosophy of iPhone. WM apps are designed keeping all these phones in mind, so to let the app get monetized to the max. iPhone apps have the same hardware, as there is only one iPhone, no choice. They have 3D acceleration, Fast processor etc etc on it, so they design graphics heavy apps that will surely run on their one and only target platform. If you have the money, have an iPhone, and play with the apps, if you dont, just f**k off, thats what apple's philosophy is. If you disagree, tell me an apple phone that comes for the price of HTC GENE.

Apps that are targeted for certain WM phones do run with all the iCandy as possible on that phone. I dont have any exact example right now, but i am sure somebody here will provide if needed.
For example, if an app is designed to run on a HTC Touch Pro 2 exclusively, i m sure you'll see much better interface than the one which is designed to run on as many devices as possible, from the low end HTC Gene to ultra high end TouchPro 2.

I hope this will clear things out a bit for everyone.

[speed_pour]

First off, whoever thinks that attaching some pretty graphics to the screen in .Net/C# is challenging, you seriously need to take more than an introductory class at a community college. It's not hard, you just have to be willing to find the graphics to use. Animation in WM is certainly more daunting and would be far easier to do if MS would have added WPF to the CF 3.5...

...the abundance of abbreviations in that last line just goes to show that programming is getting too annoying :)


Anyway, to answer one particular point which everybody else glossed over, is that Android ALSO has a lot of pretty apps like the iPhone (even though people ignore it). What people don't talk about is that android actually has it's own interface mechanism a lot like WPF/XAML which is supposed to be very friendly (I haven't really checked yet, but it seems to be popular).

A lot of people blame it on different devices having such different specs. While that SEEMS like a good argument, everybody who says it is blindly babbling without realizing that in 4-5 years the iPhone and Android phones will ALL BE VGA!!!!! If they aren't VGA, then NOBODY WILL BUY THEM!!!!! Hint hint, that means that both of those platforms will suffer the same problem that WM is "credited" with now.

The different resolution quality (VGA vs QVGA) is little more than a matter of releasing the original graphics in multiple sets. The issue of different resolution dimensions (WVGA vs VGA vs other-weird-boxy-GAs) could actually be handled (in most cases) with a simple bit of programming logic in the OnPaint handler.


Now, my answer to the question.....
Fact is, look at the programming communities of Android and iPhone, they both have a massive amount of open source/dev kit type samples, especially focusing heavily on graphics (especially with the iPhone, which focuses almost exclusively on graphics). WM samples tend to focus heavily on systems programming.

One other issue that exists is that interface programming is historically complicated with low-level programming languages. Apple gets by it using a highly customized and extended form of Objective-C. Android solves it with their xaml-like language which makes building the GUI a lot like writing a web page (loose comparison for the less technically inclined, don't flame me over the inaccuracies). Windows Mobile has the .Net framework, which can be made pretty without too much effort, but it suffers from not being fully integrated with the OS, therefore a lot of apps can be sluggish when written in .Net. The other option is to write in C++, which leads us back to the much more complicated UI programming.

There's your REAL reasons. Most programmers either don't have access to (or awareness of) good samples for a lot of the better graphics tricks, and the rest of them don't want to build something that runs too slow that it's going to get tons of complaints. I think there's one other contributing issue, there's not enough people who are willing to get together and partition out the work. It would only take 5-10 decently skilled graphics programmers to work with the high number of skilled systems programmers on this forum and we could see a nearly limitless number of high quality apps that would blow away anything on any of the competing phones.

As a side note, another thought strikes me....I think a LOT of people are waiting on the Tegra chips to start circulating before they start writing a lot. I know that's had me reluctant to put too much work into a few projects.

[DhaMajoR]

Because Apple has a bigger line of programmers.

[anagarika]

Two aspects I can think of:

Apple has Steve Jobs, who happens to be educated BIG TIME in User Interface. iPhone is specifically designed (H/W and S/W locking together), so achieving it is easier.

WM (we're talking about WM, right?) is still based on PC / Desktop version, and the GUI (up to XP) doesn't change much. I believe 6.5 brings innovation (as I tested some cooked ROM) in smoothing the GUI. However, as an ex UIQ3 user, I believe, even if WM is intended for many devices (more standardized), MS can learn (and seems to be learning) from UIQ. All theme of UIQ changes a lot (scroll bar, text color, background). While for WM, the standard WM 6.1 theme won't even change the white background when we go to 'Setting' for example .. ;)

Just my 2 cents coming from different world :D

[charm1718]

After reading all this i still do not understand why WM apps, not games, are so ugly looking. People can skin various keyboards, Music Players, creat iPhone looking today screens, skin dial pads, calculators etc. Why not simple make the original app good looking? I'm not talking about animations either. Look how much better looking the dialers people are making compared to the standard dialer that some of our phones have like my Touch pro.

I saw someone on this site made a mobile version of Google Translator tool. Its perfect function wise but it could definitely look better. Someone on Ppcgeeks made a movie searching app called Cinemo. It's not ugly but its not as good looking as the Pre's Fandango app. I'm not talking about the Fandango apps function, just the form.

Look how well Weather Panel themes look & how good iContacts look. Why cant WM users have form & functionality?

[Blade0rz]

After reading all this i still do not understand why WM apps, not games, are so ugly looking. People can skin various keyboards, Music Players, creat iPhone looking today screens, skin dial pads, calculators etc. Why not simple make the original app good looking? I'm not talking about animations either. Look how much better looking the dialers people are making compared to the standard dialer that some of our phones have like my Touch pro.

I saw someone on this site made a mobile version of Google Translator tool. Its perfect function wise but it could definitely look better. Someone on Ppcgeeks made a movie searching app called Cinemo. It's not ugly but its not as good looking as the Pre's Fandango app. I'm not talking about the Fandango apps function, just the form.

Look how well Weather Panel themes look & how good iContacts look. Why cant WM users have form & functionality?

Standardisation. There are no default "fancy" controls for either MFC or .NET for Windows Mobile like there are for iPhone (and I assume Android).

To make aesthetically pleasing applications for WM requires the programmer to design their own, making each and every application completely different in appearance. These small changes confuse & irrate most users as they can't find what they're looking for, therefore we just use the default controls instead of wasting time on making it pretty.

Secondly, putting graphics onto the screen is all well and good, but you want your app to run on as many resolutions as possible. That means resizing images (ugh) or having a separate image for each resolution making your application larger (ugh).

[charm1718]

Standardisation. There are no default "fancy" controls for either MFC or .NET for Windows Mobile like there are for iPhone (and I assume Android).

To make aesthetically pleasing applications for WM requires the programmer to design their own, making each and every application completely different in appearance. These small changes confuse & irrate most users as they can't find what they're looking for, therefore we just use the default controls instead of wasting time on making it pretty.

Secondly, putting graphics onto the screen is all well and good, but you want your app to run on as many resolutions as possible. That means resizing images (ugh) or having a separate image for each resolution making your application larger (ugh).

Are all programs skinnable?
I understand that making a program for various resolutions would be tedious but what I dont understand is why do people only make things look good after its seen elsewhwere? Nobody decided to make better looking media player skins until the iPhone came out. This also the same with contacts, dialers & keyboards. If this could have been done before, why wait until someone else does it then copy it?

When I look in Development & Hacking I see apps for specific resolutions. People post asking for different resolutions and someone else might make the changes if they have a device with that resolution. Is there something the developer has to do on his end to make an app skinnable or can they all be skinned?

[Blade0rz]

Are all programs skinnable?
I understand that making a program for various resolutions would be tedious but what I dont understand is why do people only make things look good after its seen elsewhwere? Nobody decided to make better looking media player skins until the iPhone came out. This also the same with contacts, dialers & keyboards. If this could have been done before, why wait until someone else does it then copy it?

When I look in Development & Hacking I see apps for specific resolutions. People post asking for different resolutions and someone else might make the changes if they have a device with that resolution. Is there something the developer has to do on his end to make an app skinnable or can they all be skinned?

Skins have to be implemented by the developer. Although, all images that are used within a program have to be stored somewhere (either within the program itself or on your device) so those images can be found & replaced as many people on this board do. This does take some knowledge though.

And the reason people only came out with nice-looking interfaces after the iPhone is because it was innovative. It's a lot easier to copy an interface than it is to pick a design out of your brain & implement it from scratch :)

[typo]

There's several reasons why WM has a lot of ugliness in its apps.

One is due to the UI itself. Non-fullscreen apps have both a top and bottom bar cluttering the screen and apps are rarely built to "match" the existing bars. The iPhone has less screen real estate taken up by the UI, so developers can control the look a bit more. Also, as I understand it, WM offers uglier barebones formatting. The iPhone gives devs access to prettier standard controls, menus, and fonts, whereas WM devs start with ugly and aliased controls and the like.

One reason is due to age -- WM has been around a (relatively) long time and many of the apps you're seeing were designed for devices with weaker visual capabilities and were also designed when the mobile app market was smaller and less competitive, so there was less incentive to make things pretty.

Another reason is due to the fact that a lot of WM apps are made by very amateur developers who simply don't have the training and know-how to pretty things up. WM, as a platform, seems most popular amongst IT workers, geeks, and tweakers. This is why there's tons of powerful, functional apps out there -- but a lot of us geeks don't know much about design. I, unfortunately, know about design but not programming. :P

[speed_pour]

I really didn't know who and what to quote, too many thoughts, so I'm just kinda re-reading the page and commenting back as I go. Sorry it's super long :)

Someone on Ppcgeeks made a movie searching app called Cinemo. It's not ugly but its not as good looking as the Pre's Fandango app. I'm not talking about the Fandango apps function, just the form.

You compare the Cinemo app made by a single unpaid developer against a corporately paid group of developers with pre-defined branding, graphics, and an advertising department (read: designers) under Fandango. That's a bit unfair ;)
Ignoring function, most people on here could steal the graphics and duplicate the app's look.

To make aesthetically pleasing applications for WM requires the programmer to design their own, making each and every application completely different in appearance. These small changes confuse & irrate most users as they can't find what they're looking for, therefore we just use the default controls instead of wasting time on making it pretty.

This is untrue. This is a now ancient viewpoint that's still held from the days of windows 3.x when everybody was tired and confused by the wildly bad interfaces that existed for business apps which took weeks and months to learn basic function. Sure, people want to have SOME consistency with their apps like how to close it or how to find menus, but an easy interface doesn't need to use only basic controls. If this were true, then each of the new mobile os's that come out would have failed since none of their interfaces match the other phones before them. The best designs offer more graphics than text, a more interactive and direct way of achieving tasks, and having as many options without cluttering the screen or adding more taps.

...what I dont understand is why do people only make things look good after its seen elsewhwere? Nobody decided to make better looking media player skins until the iPhone came out. This also the same with contacts, dialers & keyboards. If this could have been done before, why wait until someone else does it then copy it?

Also untrue. Sure, the amount of skinning went way up after the iPhone, there's been skinning on the media player for years. There's also been 3rd party apps that are far more attractive and functional for contacts and keyboards. The reason most people didn't see this is that these were usually paid apps or poorly advertised amidst hundreds of garbage apps on various repositories of shareware trash that people posted for WinMo.

One is due to the UI itself. Non-fullscreen apps have both a top and bottom bar cluttering the screen and apps are rarely built to "match" the existing bars. The iPhone has less screen real estate taken up by the UI, so developers can control the look a bit more. Also, as I understand it, WM offers uglier barebones formatting. The iPhone gives devs access to prettier standard controls, menus, and fonts, whereas WM devs start with ugly and aliased controls and the like

WinMo developers can hide the top and bottom bars fairly easily (especially in .Net), so screen real estate is still available. I think many times we don't because we don't want to take away the legitimate use of those bars. As to the rest of what you said, spot on...the controls are ugly as opposed to the prettier ones built into other OS's. But remember what it was like to move from windows 98 (or 2000) to XP, the same thing will happen as winmo updates it's own UI libraries.

Another reason is due to the fact that a lot of WM apps are made by very amateur developers who simply don't have the training and know-how to pretty things up. WM, as a platform, seems most popular amongst IT workers, geeks, and tweakers. This is why there's tons of powerful, functional apps out there -- but a lot of us geeks don't know much about design. I, unfortunately, know about design but not programming. :P

Very true, since the educated among us were never given serious classes on UI Design or Graphics Programming. The amateurs are stumbling through even a lot of the functional stuff. The hackers are usually good at changing something, but they can't create something new.

You also say something that brings up a subject I've complained about before (and is part of an argument I've made MANY times that we need a full-scale section just for development/programming instead of the single D&H sub-section we have now). There's a lot of people on here that are good at the functional programming. There's also a few (far less) who are good at the graphics programming. There's also a ton of people who are very good at graphic design and photoshop. A LOT of the apps that are released on here have terrible UI's because the people with functional knowledge don't take/have the time to make it pretty while at the same time those with graphic programming skill are wasting weeks trying to make their program functional while it's got a great UI already done. The two types need to work together and we could easily dominate anything ever done for any mobile OS out there.


btw, I want to add my own personal complaint. One of the most performant and potentially best looking API's belongs to OpenGL ES, which is a 3d rendering functionality all of our phones have built into the recent MSM chipsets. The problem is, only some phones have working drivers, and even less have efficient drivers. I would love to use OpenGL ES to write half of the stuff I want to, but I can't do that with any expectation of it being able to run decently on any phone older than the Diamond...and that's just among HTC phones...There's no certainty of any other handset having proper function or speed. This, to me, is one of the biggest setbacks and prevents a lot of devs from aiming high.

[charm1718]

Thank you for clearing some things up. It would be great if the programmers and graphic designers could work together on more projects.

[speed_pour]

Thank you for clearing some things up. It would be great if the programmers and graphic designers could work together on more projects.

I'd like to get all three working together on projects. There's a few people who really know how to build the UI code, and there's a few wildly talented people who can put together graphics.

The thing I'd really like to do is get an organized team of people set up to work on projects, similar to how it would be done in any professional shop. A few guys who know systems/db/back-end coding, a few UI experts, and a few graphic designers. Baring that, at least get a list of people who would offer to join in on projects as they were put together.

[charm1718]

I'd like to get all three working together on projects. There's a few people who really know how to build the UI code, and there's a few wildly talented people who can put together graphics.

The thing I'd really like to do is get an organized team of people set up to work on projects, similar to how it would be done in any professional shop. A few guys who know systems/db/back-end coding, a few UI experts, and a few graphic designers. Baring that, at least get a list of people who would offer to join in on projects as they were put together.

Have you reached out to anyone & tried putting something like this together?

[speed_pour]

Have you reached out to anyone & tried putting something like this together?

I've suggested it once before. For reasons that are too varied to get into right now, I expect that it would run into some complications on this forum.

With my current constraints (lack of gainful employment), I'm reluctant to get too deeply involved in organizing such a project unless it had the potential of turning profits. I do see a lot of potential in forming a group that produced both freeware/open source apps along with some commercial apps...I would be happy to be involved in that venture. If any serious developers are interested in a project like this, I would certainly find the time to organize and also be a developer.

[charm1718]

Speed_pour did you see this thread? http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=520689

It's a start as far as developers along with graphic designer working together.

[mr.jaguar]

the reason most apps on windows mobile/phone are so ugly is because for years "skinners" have been "hackers" and so forth. no one ever took them for anything more than a bunch of kids hacking up software to make it prettier, which inherently makes everything slower (sarcasm).