Our field has a weird relationship with terminal and command line interfaces. The time has come to re-evaluate it.

I’m on a kick lately getting my friends to try building native user interfaces. I built my first serious Mac application a few months ago, and since then I’ve built more native UI thingies than in my entire career prior to that. Let’s take a quick tour.

This is MDV.app , the greatest Markdown viewer in the world until someone else writes a serious markdown viewer. I’ve already written a bunch about MDV and won’t wear you down with more advocacy for it. It is great, though.

I had almost no hand in writing this UI code. Why would I? Like most user interfaces, MDV doesn’t break any new ground. It’s not a challenging problem. But building good UI is very hard: this kind of code is tedious, repetitive, exacting, and gated by platform conceptual knowledge. It takes years to get good at this kind of work. Which is why I would never hand-write this program.…