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You’ve mentioned this several times now as though it’s some magic sauce that everybody is missing. But it’s not like FPC/Lazarus is the only portable GUI solut

You’ve mentioned this several times now as though it’s some magic sauce that everybody is missing. But it’s not like FPC/Lazarus is the only portable GUI solution — Qt, Fox, Swing, SWT, Gtk etc. also exist, and don’t require a fringe language (and I say that as someone who did Turbo/Borland Pascal and Delphi development for more than a decade). What Lazarus offers is a Delphi-type form builder tool, but that seems a lot less interesting in this day and age of heavily customized UIs that aren’t static grids of square components — in particular, we increasingly rely on responsive layouts and smooth animations between them. Moreover, I’ve yet to see a FPC app (or any app for that matter that isn’t Electron or web) that doesn’t look like an old fashioned Windows-style GUI app. Do you have any examples?

eklavya 8y ago
QML apps look modern and quite good really.
arcticwombat 8y ago
It's not magic sauce, it's a counter-point to the "Electron gives you cross platform deployments" argument. Yes, there are many GUI toolkits, the LCL creates native applications while some others do not, but it's certainly not the only one. It's the one I prefer so I use it as an example over QT, Swing, JavaFX, etc. Lazarus form builder let's you create forms very quickly and easy, and OS themed design. If you want other types of GUI designs you can do that too, though personally I prefer standard OS design. As far as static grids and square components, I think you're looking at old stuff.. You can make things as squiggly as you like, and of course you can always use images and colors to design your GUI and let your imagination run wild, and it'll look entirely non-native. Responsive design isn't that challenging either, use anchors and smart design. I don't have any examples of desktop applications I've made, that look like web-apps, no, but I might make some after you giving me this idea, and I'll be doing it with FPC/Lazarus.
- throwahoy 8y ago
  I’m still not convinced that it’s relevant to the discussion — it’s an old-school GUI builder, Electron isn’t, and it’s a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. People gravitate to Electron not just because you can’t build cross-platform apps in it, but because the underlying UI tech is just the web. You can even do as Slack did, which is to offer the exact same app in the browser. You can’t do that with FPC/Lazarus. The latter is geared towards fairly static layouts, not the kinds of snappy, fluid, single-window apps that Electron is used to build. It’s just a very different world. Nobody is doubting that you can build decent Windows-style apps with FPC/Lazarus, just as they’re not doubting that you can do it with Qt.
  - arcticwombat 8y ago
    It's arguably the most advanced gui builder available. As for snappy, fluid, single-window apps that is 100% doable and up to the gui developer. It's not hard to use groups and switch between views, and make things dynamically resize or move around.

eklavya 8y ago

QML apps look modern and quite good really.

arcticwombat 8y ago

It's not magic sauce, it's a counter-point to the "Electron gives you cross platform deployments" argument. Yes, there are many GUI toolkits, the LCL creates native applications while some others do not, but it's certainly not the only one. It's the one I prefer so I use it as an example over QT, Swing, JavaFX, etc. Lazarus form builder let's you create forms very quickly and easy, and OS themed design. If you want other types of GUI designs you can do that too, though personally I prefer standard OS design. As far as static grids and square components, I think you're looking at old stuff.. You can make things as squiggly as you like, and of course you can always use images and colors to design your GUI and let your imagination run wild, and it'll look entirely non-native. Responsive design isn't that challenging either, use anchors and smart design. I don't have any examples of desktop applications I've made, that look like web-apps, no, but I might make some after you giving me this idea, and I'll be doing it with FPC/Lazarus.

throwahoy 8y ago
I’m still not convinced that it’s relevant to the discussion — it’s an old-school GUI builder, Electron isn’t, and it’s a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. People gravitate to Electron not just because you can’t build cross-platform apps in it, but because the underlying UI tech is just the web. You can even do as Slack did, which is to offer the exact same app in the browser. You can’t do that with FPC/Lazarus. The latter is geared towards fairly static layouts, not the kinds of snappy, fluid, single-window apps that Electron is used to build. It’s just a very different world. Nobody is doubting that you can build decent Windows-style apps with FPC/Lazarus, just as they’re not doubting that you can do it with Qt.
- arcticwombat 8y ago
  It's arguably the most advanced gui builder available. As for snappy, fluid, single-window apps that is 100% doable and up to the gui developer. It's not hard to use groups and switch between views, and make things dynamically resize or move around.