As Twhirl now supports FriendFeed and Twitter, I thought I'd give it a go. And it got me thinking.
The thing that strikes me is how, back when Java was trying to do cross platform look and feels that matched the target platform, people complained it wasn't exactly like the target platform and QED Java sucked. And now we have Air and Silverlight, where the delivered apps look nothing like the target platform, but go for this generic look and feel and... Well, if people were consistent, QED AIR and Silverlight suck.
But they don't. You know what? Cross platform look and feel consistency is now a big red herring. Web applications showed that you could do 90% of what you needed with buttons, buttons, buttons* (and some text fields and scrollers, but mostly buttons). Prettier the button, prettier the layout was, the slicker the web application was. Big buttons, rounded buttons, what turned up was a new design paradigm for applications, rectangular, rounded, and if you can make it translucent, +5 points. And into this world come AIR and Silverlight... same idea; it won't match the targetted platform, but who cares, it speaks a nice simple visual language. Click something, something happens.
Did we just rewind twenty to thirty years of GUI development?
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