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The day OS vendors come together and standardize their API's, much like browser vendors do, I will build apps with native code.

by janpot 8y ago

jacoblambda 8y ago
Well Qt is pretty much there for desktop. Almost everything can be done in a relatively straight forward, platform independent way as long as you aren't doing mobile.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  >as long as you aren't doing mobile. That to me is the biggest issue. There's "cross platform" and there's "cross platform". QT gets you the major desktop platforms, but not a ton more. The web gets you desktops, mobile phones, tablets, game consoles, TVs, car infotainment systems, even my fucking watch! Obviously you aren't going to handle all of those without some custom code for a few platforms, but when the web is a target platform for a project at all, it's often worlds easier to just spend the time on improving the mostly single codebase rather than try to do multiple codebases. And I genuinely believe that outside of larger companies, having the whole company dedicated and focused on improving one codebase is going to end up with a better user experience than splitting those same resources up over several codebases. If your app is desktop-oriented only, then Qt is such a fantastic system to work with! But it's increasingly rare that software targets desktop only.
  - jacoblambda 8y ago
    My problem that I find is that mobile, consoles, TVs, car entertainment systems, watches, and so on all need fairly distinctly different UIs from desktop and if you have to redesign the entire UI for them anyway, then why not do it in a native system that handles them well. Odds are most of the heavy lifting will either be fairly trivial or done in a separate back-end be it on a server or locally. At that point it doesn't really matter what you write the front end in as long as the back-end has a decent API. Also quick edit: A number of car dash UIs do actually run on Qt and Qt does support mobile but Qt does its own compositing instead of the OS.
- ken 8y ago
  Can you give an example of a good Qt application? The only one I’ve used recently is VirtualBox, which is terrible, but I don’t know if that’s Qt’s fault or not.
  - jacoblambda 8y ago
    The Battlenet launcher from Blizzard is a decent app that suprised the hell out of me when I found out it was Qt. Some others are Maya, EAGLE, Krita, Mathematica, VLC, and Dolphin emulator.
arcticwombat 8y ago
FPC + Lazarus, single tool with cross-compilation. It's not like browsers all got together and agreed on a standard API, literally every browser does things differently from the others.
- janpot 8y ago
  uhm, browser vendors literally got together and standardized APIs. That doesn't mean there's no bugs or unspecced territory in the current implementations. Obviously these need to be solved. Through more standardization.
izacus 8y ago
There are multiple libraries that give you just that with significantly lower footprint than a full browser engine (which is just a horribly inefficient blob of bloat you're trying to use as a cross-platform shim).

The day OS vendors come together and standardize their API's, much like browser vendors do, I will build apps with native code.

by janpot 8y ago

The day OS vendors come together and standardize their API's, much like browser vendors do, I will build apps with native code.

jacoblambda 8y ago

Well Qt is pretty much there for desktop. Almost everything can be done in a relatively straight forward, platform independent way as long as you aren't doing mobile.

Klathmon 8y ago
>as long as you aren't doing mobile. That to me is the biggest issue. There's "cross platform" and there's "cross platform". QT gets you the major desktop platforms, but not a ton more. The web gets you desktops, mobile phones, tablets, game consoles, TVs, car infotainment systems, even my fucking watch! Obviously you aren't going to handle all of those without some custom code for a few platforms, but when the web is a target platform for a project at all, it's often worlds easier to just spend the time on improving the mostly single codebase rather than try to do multiple codebases. And I genuinely believe that outside of larger companies, having the whole company dedicated and focused on improving one codebase is going to end up with a better user experience than splitting those same resources up over several codebases. If your app is desktop-oriented only, then Qt is such a fantastic system to work with! But it's increasingly rare that software targets desktop only.
- jacoblambda 8y ago
  My problem that I find is that mobile, consoles, TVs, car entertainment systems, watches, and so on all need fairly distinctly different UIs from desktop and if you have to redesign the entire UI for them anyway, then why not do it in a native system that handles them well. Odds are most of the heavy lifting will either be fairly trivial or done in a separate back-end be it on a server or locally. At that point it doesn't really matter what you write the front end in as long as the back-end has a decent API. Also quick edit: A number of car dash UIs do actually run on Qt and Qt does support mobile but Qt does its own compositing instead of the OS.
ken 8y ago
Can you give an example of a good Qt application? The only one I’ve used recently is VirtualBox, which is terrible, but I don’t know if that’s Qt’s fault or not.
- jacoblambda 8y ago
  The Battlenet launcher from Blizzard is a decent app that suprised the hell out of me when I found out it was Qt. Some others are Maya, EAGLE, Krita, Mathematica, VLC, and Dolphin emulator.

arcticwombat 8y ago

FPC + Lazarus, single tool with cross-compilation. It's not like browsers all got together and agreed on a standard API, literally every browser does things differently from the others.

janpot 8y ago
uhm, browser vendors literally got together and standardized APIs. That doesn't mean there's no bugs or unspecced territory in the current implementations. Obviously these need to be solved. Through more standardization.

izacus 8y ago

There are multiple libraries that give you just that with significantly lower footprint than a full browser engine (which is just a horribly inefficient blob of bloat you're trying to use as a cross-platform shim).