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I'm glad it's easier to write apps than ever before. But it was easy before. If you are willing to forego completely native UIs (which you are when you are usi

I'm glad it's easier to write apps than ever before. But it was easy before. If you are willing to forego completely native UIs (which you are when you are using Electron), it's always been easy to make GUI apps with Qt. Drag together an UI in designer, use (py|whatever)uic to generate classes, hook up signals/slots, and you are done. I can only pin it on intellectual laziness of front-end programmers not wanting to learn anything else than HTML/CSS/JS and companies wanting replaceable developers. There is virtually no benefit for the end user over native applications or cross-platform applications written with e.g. Qt.

voltagex_ 9y ago
Is a PyQt app really more lightweight than Electron? To be fair, Qt is a lot trickier than Electron - you've mentioned slots and signals which are not something you'd encounter every day (at least in webdev world). Edit: I also don't buy any argument that relies on "intellectual laziness". There's enough elitism around already.
- shakna 9y ago
  Well, I can't speak for today, but back in the early 2000s, I put together a simple web browser in Qt, which is easy because it already includes a simple web engine, added a simple JS engine, and the web browser was up and running. I recall being disappointed it wouldn't run nicely on '98 for some people, because it used about 25mb of RAM, and many only had 128mb for their entire system.
- danieldk 9y ago
  Is a PyQt app really more lightweight than Electron? I just tried, because it's only 5 minutes of work. The demo apps (including a movie player and an image viewer) are generally in the 30MB of memory ballpark on OS X. you've mentioned slots and signals which are not something you'd encounter every day It's something that you can pick up in a few minutes. Widgets emit signals. You can connect signals of choice to slots to handle those signals. In Python, a slot is just a Python method. In C++ is slot is also a method, but you have to add a small 'annotation' that is processed by moc.
- rsynnott 9y ago
  Yes, much. And if that's too heavy for you, WxWidgets should be even lighter.
badsectoracula 9y ago
I'd say that with Lazarus (http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/) it even easier - just drag/drop the controls to forms to build your GUI, double click on buttons/checkboxes/radiobuttons/whatever or click on menus or double click on the event editor to automatically write the event handling boilerplate code and you just write the actual code in-place. Creates native executables without need for runtimes or big DLLs (you can use Qt as a backend if you like though and in Linux you have to choose between Gtk and Qt). Here is an old video i made 2-3 years ago where i write a small 2D tilemap editor with Lazarus (the first 5-6 minutes are downloading and installing Lazarus and a tile editing tool i wrote since i used Windows 7 for that vidoe and the Win7 paint program sucks) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3JgeIUo1X0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3JgeIUo1X0
- squarefoot 9y ago
  In my previous life as a cubicle drone in the late 90s I have worked with Delphi under Windows and always dreamed about it being ported/cloned/whatever on Linux. After seeing a demonstration of Kylix many years ago I almost lost any hope (slow as molasses and buggy), then one day I saw this new project called Lazarus which promised high compatibility with Delphi code and to allow building of native apps. Admittedly it was very buggy then, but eventually it matured over time and I'd say it has been damn ready to be used for production for some years. Give it a try and you won't be disappointed.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
    I've tried to use Lazarus five or six times now, as a one-time Delphi developer: the main issue is that the lazarus ide likes to crash on the slightest provocation (and the 64bit mac versions don't work very well either)
    - squarefoot 9y ago
      This is strange. The IDE once surely had stability problems, but I've never encountered them since years. I even installed Lazarus on small NanoPI and OrangePI boards and although definitely not fast it runs natively there and produces native code for them.

voltagex_ 9y ago

Is a PyQt app really more lightweight than Electron? To be fair, Qt is a lot trickier than Electron - you've mentioned slots and signals which are not something you'd encounter every day (at least in webdev world). Edit: I also don't buy any argument that relies on "intellectual laziness". There's enough elitism around already.

shakna 9y ago
Well, I can't speak for today, but back in the early 2000s, I put together a simple web browser in Qt, which is easy because it already includes a simple web engine, added a simple JS engine, and the web browser was up and running. I recall being disappointed it wouldn't run nicely on '98 for some people, because it used about 25mb of RAM, and many only had 128mb for their entire system.
danieldk 9y ago
Is a PyQt app really more lightweight than Electron? I just tried, because it's only 5 minutes of work. The demo apps (including a movie player and an image viewer) are generally in the 30MB of memory ballpark on OS X. you've mentioned slots and signals which are not something you'd encounter every day It's something that you can pick up in a few minutes. Widgets emit signals. You can connect signals of choice to slots to handle those signals. In Python, a slot is just a Python method. In C++ is slot is also a method, but you have to add a small 'annotation' that is processed by moc.
rsynnott 9y ago
Yes, much. And if that's too heavy for you, WxWidgets should be even lighter.

badsectoracula 9y ago

I'd say that with Lazarus (http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/) it even easier - just drag/drop the controls to forms to build your GUI, double click on buttons/checkboxes/radiobuttons/whatever or click on menus or double click on the event editor to automatically write the event handling boilerplate code and you just write the actual code in-place. Creates native executables without need for runtimes or big DLLs (you can use Qt as a backend if you like though and in Linux you have to choose between Gtk and Qt). Here is an old video i made 2-3 years ago where i write a small 2D tilemap editor with Lazarus (the first 5-6 minutes are downloading and installing Lazarus and a tile editing tool i wrote since i used Windows 7 for that vidoe and the Win7 paint program sucks) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3JgeIUo1X0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3JgeIUo1X0

squarefoot 9y ago
In my previous life as a cubicle drone in the late 90s I have worked with Delphi under Windows and always dreamed about it being ported/cloned/whatever on Linux. After seeing a demonstration of Kylix many years ago I almost lost any hope (slow as molasses and buggy), then one day I saw this new project called Lazarus which promised high compatibility with Delphi code and to allow building of native apps. Admittedly it was very buggy then, but eventually it matured over time and I'd say it has been damn ready to be used for production for some years. Give it a try and you won't be disappointed.
- fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
  I've tried to use Lazarus five or six times now, as a one-time Delphi developer: the main issue is that the lazarus ide likes to crash on the slightest provocation (and the 64bit mac versions don't work very well either)
  - squarefoot 9y ago
    This is strange. The IDE once surely had stability problems, but I've never encountered them since years. I even installed Lazarus on small NanoPI and OrangePI boards and although definitely not fast it runs natively there and produces native code for them.