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> It only has happened that way because our industry has been so web focused for so many years, that very little brain power has gone into cross platform deskto

by zach43 9y ago

> It only has happened that way because our industry has been so web focused for so many years, that very little brain power has gone into cross platform desktop apps for a long time. While there is an ongoing trend to move towards web apps, I think you are mixing up the causality here a little bit. The main reason why developers are increasingly choosing to move towards web technologies for UI is the sheer pain of doing any kind of cross-platform development on the desktop. Most of the nice desktop development frameworks (like the ones in C# or Swift) are not cross platform. Meanwhile, we have a decent cross-platform UI framework in Qt, but this requires dealing with C++, which doesn’t even have a good package manager behind it. You could also use GTK+, wxWidgets, FLTK, but these don’t provide a good look and feel and non-Linux OSes. Basically if you want to easy-to-use cross-platform desktop UI development, your choices boil down to Electron, and maybe pyQt. Desktop developers have years to make this a better situation by perhaps promoting cross-platform UI standards or building better tooling, but nothing good has really gained much traction, so more developers are justifiably moving to Electron for now.

dgreensp 9y ago
The reason the causality sounds backwards is the GP is talking about secondary effects of what you are talking about — the other half of a vicious cycle. We are already a decade into neglecting native app technologies in favor of web app technologies, because web apps were much easier to write and deliver than cross-platform native apps (and largely still are). It’s to the point where even big companies with lots of resources are hiring web programmers and web designers to build their UIs. It’s interesting to me that mobile changes the trade-offs. The quality gulf between web and native apps is greater. The web sucks more on mobile, and expectations for native apps (animations, touch, etc) are higher. Mobile OSes also make it much easier for users to install and manage native apps than it is on desktop (because of the app store, no custom installers, no users locked out of installing apps by their employers as far as I know). I’m excited about React Native for addressing the cross-platform part. We’ve learned since Java that even if you don’t have “write once, run anywhere,” you can still have “learn once, write anywhere,” a la React. Also, we expect apps to come with their own systems of UI widgets these days, not necessarily “native look and feel.” It really changes the game.
jrs95 9y ago
Java FX is a decent solution as well. It's just not cool.
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y ago
>You could also use GTK+, wxWidgets, FLTK, but these don’t provide a good look and feel and non-Linux OSes. Wx is using native widgets on every platform.

by zach43 9y ago

dgreensp 9y ago

The reason the causality sounds backwards is the GP is talking about secondary effects of what you are talking about — the other half of a vicious cycle. We are already a decade into neglecting native app technologies in favor of web app technologies, because web apps were much easier to write and deliver than cross-platform native apps (and largely still are). It’s to the point where even big companies with lots of resources are hiring web programmers and web designers to build their UIs. It’s interesting to me that mobile changes the trade-offs. The quality gulf between web and native apps is greater. The web sucks more on mobile, and expectations for native apps (animations, touch, etc) are higher. Mobile OSes also make it much easier for users to install and manage native apps than it is on desktop (because of the app store, no custom installers, no users locked out of installing apps by their employers as far as I know). I’m excited about React Native for addressing the cross-platform part. We’ve learned since Java that even if you don’t have “write once, run anywhere,” you can still have “learn once, write anywhere,” a la React. Also, we expect apps to come with their own systems of UI widgets these days, not necessarily “native look and feel.” It really changes the game.

jrs95 9y ago

Java FX is a decent solution as well. It's just not cool.

xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y ago

>You could also use GTK+, wxWidgets, FLTK, but these don’t provide a good look and feel and non-Linux OSes. Wx is using native widgets on every platform.