5 ms·

Glad to see an Electron application that finally has a decent, native-looking, unsurprising UI :-). (Edit: sadly, I'm only half-joking. I was thinking about ho

by alxlaz 8y ago

Glad to see an Electron application that finally has a decent, native-looking, unsurprising UI :-). (Edit: sadly, I'm only half-joking. I was thinking about how fun it would be to extend this so as to bridge the host and the guest via e.g. a socket, so that I could get notifications about UI events inside the machine on the host, which would give me Visual Basic 6's UI builder and all the greatness of a 21st century machine, so that I could finally whip up an UI without yelling profanities at the CSS reference and in less than umpteen hours of tinkering with stuff that clearly just wasn't built for this. Thing is, halfway through, I really began thinking this might make sense a little and that depresses me. /done editing) That being said, if anyone's curious what else can be achieved in this manner, there's a bunch of nice demos here: https://github.com/copy/v86 https://github.com/copy/v86 .

bevenky 8y ago
Win 98 next!
meredydd 8y ago
> give me Visual Basic 6's UI builder and all the greatness of a 21st century machine, so that I could finally whip up an UI without yelling profanities at the CSS reference [...] that clearly just wasn't built for this Can I interest you in a VB6-y design/code/deploy tool with no CSS or JS? It's all in Python, even in-browser: https://anvil.works https://anvil.works
- johnhattan 8y ago
  Also the Lazarus Pascal IDE is still around and is keeping the old-school VB flame alive. Just looking at the screenshots will make you nostalgic. https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
  - rzzzt 8y ago
    iBasic is, however, on permanent hiatus: http://basic.mindteq.com/index.php?i=88 http://basic.mindteq.com/index.php?i=88
- devxpy 8y ago
  Wow, I nearly forgot about it. Revisiting today, I see you've made a lot of progress. Keep up the good work! Btw, Anvil uplink works with a non-public IP right?
  - meredydd 8y ago
    Yep :) When you load the uplink library, it makes an HTTPS connection to Anvil from your code, so it can be anywhere as long as it can make outbound requests.
    - devxpy 8y ago
      Did you try doing full p2p? Just curious..
- alxlaz 8y ago
  It's been on my to-try list for a long time. I think this is as good an evening as any :-).
- kossae 8y ago
  After watching the demo and reminiscing of my beginnings in programming experimentation, I feel like this paradigm will become the de-facto way to produce an app in the future. At least basic CRUD apps which are still tons of standard boilerplate today. I could see this mapping to React(+Native) and generating mobile apps, etc. The future is bright! Great work on this!
protomyth 8y ago
Well, the web still isn't up to the UI ease of programming of the operating system it was started on (NeXTSTEP). With all the standards and work, you would think a VB6 or Interface Builder could actually be built for the web.
- alxlaz 8y ago
  I know what you mean, and I've often wondered why this hasn't happened yet. I honestly think that a big reason why this has not yet happened is that most of the young folks who are equipped with the kind of free time and expertise to do it have no idea how easy Visual Basic was. And not just VB6 -- NeXTStep/OpenSTEP, Delphi... They were never exposed to the successes -- and many, many failures -- of the RAD environments of the 1990s. (I've been toggling bits and writing C for a living for a long time now, I certainly suck at anything web-related). You look at enthusiastic web developers telling you that Electron is easy if you couple it with React (I think?) or Photon, and I mean, they're sort of right if you're comparing it to GTK (or ohgodohgodohgod MFC). But if you've touched Visual Basic, NeXTStep (or Cocoa, or GNUStep), or even Qt for that matter, it seems anything but easy. It's illuminating to show someone who's reasonably apt with computers but never wrote much code (save, maybe, for some Excel formulas) how to write the "canonical" currency converter app from the NeXTStep docs. You need to explain pretty much four concepts to get them to grok how things work in Visual Basic: what a form is, what an event is, what an event handler is, and how you get and set data from and to UI elements. You can whip it up together in 30 minutes, tops, and they can do a variation on that topic all by themselves the next day. You need half that time just to explain what CSS is and how to center most things with it, and then you get into the whole renderer process vs. main process thing. Eww. I suppose the other big reason is that things like branding and recognition are touted as Really Important (TM), so no one really wants to design a tool that helps you build an interface that looks like any other interface (somewhat ironic, considering how uniform and compliant web design is in 2018).
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    I often lament that the kind of empowerment things like Visual Basic --and before it QBasic, BASICA, and the 8-bit micro BASICs-- brought us pretty much no longer exists in modern computing. Allowing people to easily build their own tools to solve their own problems is a big part of what personal computing is all about as far as I'm concerned, and there's just no effort put into it today. Even on something like Linux, which you'd think would have a community favorable of the concept, you instead have a bunch of elitists declaring that only professional C greybeards should even be allowed to change the background color.
woah 8y ago
Have you ever used flex box?

by alxlaz 8y ago

bevenky 8y ago

Win 98 next!

meredydd 8y ago

> give me Visual Basic 6's UI builder and all the greatness of a 21st century machine, so that I could finally whip up an UI without yelling profanities at the CSS reference [...] that clearly just wasn't built for this Can I interest you in a VB6-y design/code/deploy tool with no CSS or JS? It's all in Python, even in-browser: https://anvil.works https://anvil.works

johnhattan 8y ago
Also the Lazarus Pascal IDE is still around and is keeping the old-school VB flame alive. Just looking at the screenshots will make you nostalgic. https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
- rzzzt 8y ago
  iBasic is, however, on permanent hiatus: http://basic.mindteq.com/index.php?i=88 http://basic.mindteq.com/index.php?i=88
devxpy 8y ago
Wow, I nearly forgot about it. Revisiting today, I see you've made a lot of progress. Keep up the good work! Btw, Anvil uplink works with a non-public IP right?
- meredydd 8y ago
  Yep :) When you load the uplink library, it makes an HTTPS connection to Anvil from your code, so it can be anywhere as long as it can make outbound requests.
  - devxpy 8y ago
    Did you try doing full p2p? Just curious..
alxlaz 8y ago
It's been on my to-try list for a long time. I think this is as good an evening as any :-).
kossae 8y ago
After watching the demo and reminiscing of my beginnings in programming experimentation, I feel like this paradigm will become the de-facto way to produce an app in the future. At least basic CRUD apps which are still tons of standard boilerplate today. I could see this mapping to React(+Native) and generating mobile apps, etc. The future is bright! Great work on this!

protomyth 8y ago

Well, the web still isn't up to the UI ease of programming of the operating system it was started on (NeXTSTEP). With all the standards and work, you would think a VB6 or Interface Builder could actually be built for the web.

alxlaz 8y ago
I know what you mean, and I've often wondered why this hasn't happened yet. I honestly think that a big reason why this has not yet happened is that most of the young folks who are equipped with the kind of free time and expertise to do it have no idea how easy Visual Basic was. And not just VB6 -- NeXTStep/OpenSTEP, Delphi... They were never exposed to the successes -- and many, many failures -- of the RAD environments of the 1990s. (I've been toggling bits and writing C for a living for a long time now, I certainly suck at anything web-related). You look at enthusiastic web developers telling you that Electron is easy if you couple it with React (I think?) or Photon, and I mean, they're sort of right if you're comparing it to GTK (or ohgodohgodohgod MFC). But if you've touched Visual Basic, NeXTStep (or Cocoa, or GNUStep), or even Qt for that matter, it seems anything but easy. It's illuminating to show someone who's reasonably apt with computers but never wrote much code (save, maybe, for some Excel formulas) how to write the "canonical" currency converter app from the NeXTStep docs. You need to explain pretty much four concepts to get them to grok how things work in Visual Basic: what a form is, what an event is, what an event handler is, and how you get and set data from and to UI elements. You can whip it up together in 30 minutes, tops, and they can do a variation on that topic all by themselves the next day. You need half that time just to explain what CSS is and how to center most things with it, and then you get into the whole renderer process vs. main process thing. Eww. I suppose the other big reason is that things like branding and recognition are touted as Really Important (TM), so no one really wants to design a tool that helps you build an interface that looks like any other interface (somewhat ironic, considering how uniform and compliant web design is in 2018).
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  I often lament that the kind of empowerment things like Visual Basic --and before it QBasic, BASICA, and the 8-bit micro BASICs-- brought us pretty much no longer exists in modern computing. Allowing people to easily build their own tools to solve their own problems is a big part of what personal computing is all about as far as I'm concerned, and there's just no effort put into it today. Even on something like Linux, which you'd think would have a community favorable of the concept, you instead have a bunch of elitists declaring that only professional C greybeards should even be allowed to change the background color.

woah 8y ago

Have you ever used flex box?