Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces, from a developer

Saw a lot of words here. Not a lot of examples.

"Dark mode was one of the most requested features for Lighthouse. I refrained a long time from adding it because it adds additional work to every UI task."

This reveals a lot about the regression in OSes. Way back in the early '90s, Windows provided a color-scheme editor. Users could set up any color scheme they liked, and all properly-written apps would inherit it and work fine.

I think the major Unix GUIs offered something similar. Meanwhile, Apple's vaunted UI was crippled by hard-coded colors everywhere.

Fast-forward what, 20 years? Everyone finally realizes that inverse color schemes (black text on a white background) SUCK. But what does Microsoft do? REMOVE the color-scheme editor from Windows.

We're still running around trying to deal with a "problem" that was solved 25 years ago. And, as a developer, I can tell you it has been pretty shambolic on Apple platforms. I guess you can say they never understood proper color management, but... damn. So many broken controls in iOS after "dark mode" was first added. A massive design and QA failure.

The notion that the sidebar icons should be aligned with the firm brand logo doesn't make sense to me, these things are not the same. On that point, the before looks better than the after, to me, as the difference is differentiated.

The "what good looks like" example provided, HeroUI, avoids aligning these:

https://www.heroui.pro/components/application/layouts

I honestly don't care at all about "good-looking"; I care more about "functional". Far too many apps seem to be aiming for the former instead of or at the expense of the latter.