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Have you ever designed an application with Qt Designer or Delphi for that matter? Both are literally drag and drop. You can make a first mock-up of a applicatio

Have you ever designed an application with Qt Designer or Delphi for that matter? Both are literally drag and drop. You can make a first mock-up of a application in a few minutes. I have developed some larger Qt applications and in each case there are at most a couple dozen of lines with platform-specific code. Qt abstracts away most of the platform differences. For me ‘good looking UIs and UI patterns’ means: well integrated in the platform and accessible. Electron apps fail miserably in both departments.

Mononokay 9y ago
Neither are as good as 99% of the tools available for development with HTML/CSS. Plus, with HTML/CSS, you can work manually on your project, without any special tool besides your browser, and see the effects you have on the layout in real time. Delphi/Qt Designer look way worse than any HTML/CSS/JS GUI builder, too - along with having interfaces equivalent to what GIMP's is to Photoshop.
- danieldk 9y ago
  Neither are as good as 99% of the tools available for development with HTML/CSS. [...] Delphi/Qt Designer look way worse than any HTML/CSS/JS GUI builder, too - along with having interfaces equivalent to what GIMP's is to Photoshop. I have a feeling that you do not have any actual experience with Qt Designer or RAD tools? Designing a user interface quickly is many times easier in Qt, Delphi, etc. than in HTML/CSS. It start with the basic fact that Qt has many useful widgets that are not available in plain HTML, nor many CSS/Javascript frameworks. From there it is just drag and drop, adding a few spacers here and there and you are done. Plus, with HTML/CSS, you can work manually on your project, without any special tool besides your browser, Why would I develop in such an arcane manner if I already have great development tools for more than two decades? Again, I recommend anyone who only has HTML/CSS experience to look beyond their bubble. We had RAD tools with Delphi 1.0 in 1995, where you could build a user interface using drag and drop and associate code with event by simply double clicking a widget in the interface builder. I built GUI applications in Delphi as a 13-year old because it was trivial, even without an internet connection, StackOverflow, etc.
  - Fins 9y ago
    At one of my jobs, a Delphi application (admittedly quite old) was reimplemented with the latest (at trhe time, anyway, I'm sure it's completely passe now) web frameworks, fancy Javascripts, nd all that. Not only did it take something like two orders of magnitude more man-hours to develop, but it takes users twice as long to get anything done, too.
  - Mononokay 9y ago
    I have a feeling that you do not have any actual experience with Qt Designer or RAD tools? Designing a user interface quickly is many times easier in Qt, Delphi, etc. than in HTML/CSS. It start with the basic fact that Qt has many useful widgets that are not available in plain HTML, nor many CSS/Javascript frameworks. From there it is just drag and drop, adding a few spacers here and there and you are done. I have a fair bit, albeit less than the average user of said programs, of experience with Qt Designer and, admittedly to a lesser extent, Delphi. They're infinitely more complicated than, say, Adobe Muse. Muse has plenty of widgets, too; even if it's not 1:1 on pure quantity. BlueGriffon is quite nice, too. Why would I develop in such an arcane manner if I already have great development tools for more than two decades? Modern web browsers* have more or less functional IDEs within their devtools. *Except Firefox, of which has devtools half a mile behind most other browsers, at least in my opinion. Of course, I'm speaking from the point of view of someone who's a much worse programmer than designer.
- Fins 9y ago
  But what exactly do any HTML/CSS do for me that I could not do with a 17 years old copy of Delphi? And the resulting application will be harder to use, bloated, and much slower than a Delphi one (let alone using something more modern). I can understand the cross-platform angle, but not ease of development (unless you are limiting yourself to the very, well, limiting subset of interactions and controls that are easy to do in HTML). Nor, for that matter, the quality of the end-product.
  - Mononokay 9y ago
    It can do a bit less, if you're opting to go with pure HTML/CSS; however, without JS, pure HTML/CSS is quite snappy if done well, and infinitely easier to write, from my experience. It's also easier, in my opinion, to make nice looking interfaces with. Don't get me wrong, I love native applications—but saying that they're easier to develop than something in HTML/CSS is, generally speaking, not true. Granted, I'm far worse of a programmer than a designer, so I might be missing out on what's good about Delphi because of it.
    - Fins 9y ago
      Well, it had always taken me far less time and effort to do a nice, interactive app in Delphi than it would in HTML/JS. For a designer, yes, I can see your point -- it's easy to use markup to make something that looks good (or at least this month's fashion for web pages good) quickly. It's when you want to add any kind of sophisticated behavior and non-standard UI (i.e. exactly why you would want to have a desktop app instead of just using a browser in the first place) where even old Delphi would be far superior. And the result would actually look like a native app, too.
      - Mononokay 9y ago
        Native applications vary too wildly, in my opinion. HTML/CSS/JS make it easy to get a consistent UI, which is incredibly valuable if you're making software for less technically advanced people than your average HN poster. Discord's a highly admirable, semi-complicated web application, that extremely benefits by not looking native, in my opinion. The interface of it is miles ahead of any native desktop VOIP/Text client I know of, and I don't think it'd have been done without Electron. Of course, I'll agree that generally nothing more complicated than that should be anything but native.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  > Delphi/Qt Designer look way worse than any HTML/CSS/JS GUI builder, too Can you please provide an example of such tool? Doing UI development since Windows 3.x days, and I am yet to find such a tool for HTML/CSS/JS development. Oh and in the process it would be nice to know about a least one comparable component library for such tool.

Mononokay 9y ago

Neither are as good as 99% of the tools available for development with HTML/CSS. Plus, with HTML/CSS, you can work manually on your project, without any special tool besides your browser, and see the effects you have on the layout in real time. Delphi/Qt Designer look way worse than any HTML/CSS/JS GUI builder, too - along with having interfaces equivalent to what GIMP's is to Photoshop.

danieldk 9y ago
Neither are as good as 99% of the tools available for development with HTML/CSS. [...] Delphi/Qt Designer look way worse than any HTML/CSS/JS GUI builder, too - along with having interfaces equivalent to what GIMP's is to Photoshop. I have a feeling that you do not have any actual experience with Qt Designer or RAD tools? Designing a user interface quickly is many times easier in Qt, Delphi, etc. than in HTML/CSS. It start with the basic fact that Qt has many useful widgets that are not available in plain HTML, nor many CSS/Javascript frameworks. From there it is just drag and drop, adding a few spacers here and there and you are done. Plus, with HTML/CSS, you can work manually on your project, without any special tool besides your browser, Why would I develop in such an arcane manner if I already have great development tools for more than two decades? Again, I recommend anyone who only has HTML/CSS experience to look beyond their bubble. We had RAD tools with Delphi 1.0 in 1995, where you could build a user interface using drag and drop and associate code with event by simply double clicking a widget in the interface builder. I built GUI applications in Delphi as a 13-year old because it was trivial, even without an internet connection, StackOverflow, etc.
- Fins 9y ago
  At one of my jobs, a Delphi application (admittedly quite old) was reimplemented with the latest (at trhe time, anyway, I'm sure it's completely passe now) web frameworks, fancy Javascripts, nd all that. Not only did it take something like two orders of magnitude more man-hours to develop, but it takes users twice as long to get anything done, too.
- Mononokay 9y ago
  I have a feeling that you do not have any actual experience with Qt Designer or RAD tools? Designing a user interface quickly is many times easier in Qt, Delphi, etc. than in HTML/CSS. It start with the basic fact that Qt has many useful widgets that are not available in plain HTML, nor many CSS/Javascript frameworks. From there it is just drag and drop, adding a few spacers here and there and you are done. I have a fair bit, albeit less than the average user of said programs, of experience with Qt Designer and, admittedly to a lesser extent, Delphi. They're infinitely more complicated than, say, Adobe Muse. Muse has plenty of widgets, too; even if it's not 1:1 on pure quantity. BlueGriffon is quite nice, too. Why would I develop in such an arcane manner if I already have great development tools for more than two decades? Modern web browsers* have more or less functional IDEs within their devtools. *Except Firefox, of which has devtools half a mile behind most other browsers, at least in my opinion. Of course, I'm speaking from the point of view of someone who's a much worse programmer than designer.
Fins 9y ago
But what exactly do any HTML/CSS do for me that I could not do with a 17 years old copy of Delphi? And the resulting application will be harder to use, bloated, and much slower than a Delphi one (let alone using something more modern). I can understand the cross-platform angle, but not ease of development (unless you are limiting yourself to the very, well, limiting subset of interactions and controls that are easy to do in HTML). Nor, for that matter, the quality of the end-product.
- Mononokay 9y ago
  It can do a bit less, if you're opting to go with pure HTML/CSS; however, without JS, pure HTML/CSS is quite snappy if done well, and infinitely easier to write, from my experience. It's also easier, in my opinion, to make nice looking interfaces with. Don't get me wrong, I love native applications—but saying that they're easier to develop than something in HTML/CSS is, generally speaking, not true. Granted, I'm far worse of a programmer than a designer, so I might be missing out on what's good about Delphi because of it.
  - Fins 9y ago
    Well, it had always taken me far less time and effort to do a nice, interactive app in Delphi than it would in HTML/JS. For a designer, yes, I can see your point -- it's easy to use markup to make something that looks good (or at least this month's fashion for web pages good) quickly. It's when you want to add any kind of sophisticated behavior and non-standard UI (i.e. exactly why you would want to have a desktop app instead of just using a browser in the first place) where even old Delphi would be far superior. And the result would actually look like a native app, too.
    - Mononokay 9y ago
      Native applications vary too wildly, in my opinion. HTML/CSS/JS make it easy to get a consistent UI, which is incredibly valuable if you're making software for less technically advanced people than your average HN poster. Discord's a highly admirable, semi-complicated web application, that extremely benefits by not looking native, in my opinion. The interface of it is miles ahead of any native desktop VOIP/Text client I know of, and I don't think it'd have been done without Electron. Of course, I'll agree that generally nothing more complicated than that should be anything but native.
pjmlp 9y ago
> Delphi/Qt Designer look way worse than any HTML/CSS/JS GUI builder, too Can you please provide an example of such tool? Doing UI development since Windows 3.x days, and I am yet to find such a tool for HTML/CSS/JS development. Oh and in the process it would be nice to know about a least one comparable component library for such tool.