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We've been making the rounds over all the options over and over again for planning a new app, and we always reluctantly come back to Electron. Qt? No mobile, s

by api 9y ago

We've been making the rounds over all the options over and over again for planning a new app, and we always reluctantly come back to Electron. Qt? No mobile, slower development. Java? No mobile, deployment nightmare, Oracle cooties, and often just as heavy as Electron. Native UI? Out of the question. We don't have anywhere near the resources to develop our app four to five times, implement every new feature four to five times, etc. Others are some combination of immaturity, lack of mobile support, out of date, lack of support for internationalization and accessibility, etc. I agree that Electron is cancer, but until there's a better game in town it's the only thing that could possibly meet our needs. We would pay for a better option, but unfortunately there are probably not enough of us to make another option economically viable. Nobody pays for developer tools so it's an awful market for startups, and a modern UI API with cross platform capability is just too much work for independent open source efforts. My dream would be a really clean cross platform UI library that lets you develop in a language like Go or Rust. UI development in 2018 is a sad state of affairs. It was better in many ways in the 1990s and early 2000s. We had wxWidgets and Qt then and they were decent. Mobile "ruined" it by introducing another incredibly popular UI paradigm that rendered literally everything written to date obsolete.

framel 9y ago
https://www.qt.io/mobile-app-development/ https://www.qt.io/mobile-app-development/
- api 9y ago
  That's QML, which isn't that different from a browser rendering engine. I'm talking about an actual native UI implemented in native code, not a weird quasi-browser. Of course Qt itself also has quasi-browser features like its style sheet widget styling stuff. If we're going there, why not just use HTML5/JS which has a million billion times more support? Also C++ is not really the best option. I code systems software in C++ but for UI dev it's not quite productive enough. I've worked with large Qt code bases before and no thanks. I suppose if they've modernized it and incorporated C++11 features it might be more bearable, but in the past it was a pretty awful mess of raw pointers and ownership semantics bugs and very very long compile times.
  - seba_dos1 9y ago
    Aren't good old QtWidgets supported just fine on Android and iOS, just like they were on Maemo and even Symbian?
    - api 9y ago
      Even if this were true it would look and feel horrible like old Windows Mobile with its tiny start menu and desktop apps you had to peck at with a stylus.
      - seba_dos1 9y ago
        As a heavy user of QtWidgets (and GTK+, FWIW) apps on Maemo even today, I can say that's entirely not true.
jrs95 9y ago
Perhaps a “low memory mode” or something like that could fix this? If I had to guess, I would think a lot of nice UX features could be disabled and that might reduce memory usage dramatically. Only load recent messages in the currently selected channel, don’t display anything but text, etc. I doubt this would really reduce usage of features a lot overall, and few people would ever turn this on, but it might get the power users to stop complaining about performance.

by api 9y ago

framel 9y ago

https://www.qt.io/mobile-app-development/ https://www.qt.io/mobile-app-development/

api 9y ago
That's QML, which isn't that different from a browser rendering engine. I'm talking about an actual native UI implemented in native code, not a weird quasi-browser. Of course Qt itself also has quasi-browser features like its style sheet widget styling stuff. If we're going there, why not just use HTML5/JS which has a million billion times more support? Also C++ is not really the best option. I code systems software in C++ but for UI dev it's not quite productive enough. I've worked with large Qt code bases before and no thanks. I suppose if they've modernized it and incorporated C++11 features it might be more bearable, but in the past it was a pretty awful mess of raw pointers and ownership semantics bugs and very very long compile times.
- seba_dos1 9y ago
  Aren't good old QtWidgets supported just fine on Android and iOS, just like they were on Maemo and even Symbian?
  - api 9y ago
    Even if this were true it would look and feel horrible like old Windows Mobile with its tiny start menu and desktop apps you had to peck at with a stylus.
    - seba_dos1 9y ago
      As a heavy user of QtWidgets (and GTK+, FWIW) apps on Maemo even today, I can say that's entirely not true.

jrs95 9y ago

Perhaps a “low memory mode” or something like that could fix this? If I had to guess, I would think a lot of nice UX features could be disabled and that might reduce memory usage dramatically. Only load recent messages in the currently selected channel, don’t display anything but text, etc. I doubt this would really reduce usage of features a lot overall, and few people would ever turn this on, but it might get the power users to stop complaining about performance.