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>I miss the days of VB6 and creating a GUI in drag-and-drop, aligning everything That was a fixed non-resizable layout, showing static content. >I knew if I w

>I miss the days of VB6 and creating a GUI in drag-and-drop, aligning everything That was a fixed non-resizable layout, showing static content. >I knew if I wanted to set the Label of Button1 programmatically as the window opened, I'd create a Window1.OnLoad method, and set Button1.Label to whatever I wanted... That works initially for simple UIs, but gets ugly really fast once you need to start displaying data items, including possible loading states and error states, etc. Mobile apps tend to fetch content from the internet a lot. You could also do your example in Android - just add a setText call to onStart of whatever empty Activity the wizard created for you. Jetpack Compose promises to make Android UI development much nicer in the future https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose - there is bit of a trend of mobile moving towards more React-like UI patterns (e.g. SwiftUI, Flutter, etc.).

g_p 6y ago
Thanks for mentioning Jetpack Compose - not something I had heard of. Sounds like there is a growing trend towards declarative UI models, and that doesn't seem too bad. I don't particularly take offence with using XML to define the UI as such, but the clunky integration with Java was what annoyed me. Agreed regarding the limitations of VB6 to static and non resizeable content, though I suppose from a developer perspective it worked nicely. It just seems genuinely strange we haven't seen innovation to improve on the UI design side. Maybe the declarative shift will give us this though! Regarding the dynamic fetching and challenges there, absolutely this is the new challenge for an app model. But equally, surely this kind of logic is now the new "boilerplate"? Most apps need (or would benefit from) some kind of smart lazy loading. Can totally get my head around that, and clearly we need to work asynchronously. But I've never really seen anything that fit the bill for solving this, and it never felt like Android was trying to improve it itself. To my mind the API should be elegant to the point of near invisibility, for simple tasks - assuming I already know the URL to fetch from and any HTTP Auth is handled by my HTTP library, in an ideal world, I'd just say where to get the "data stuff" from, and then tell it what to do when that happens. In this ideal world, caching helps to keep the UI responsive (and fresh) with minimum need to tweak this unless I want to. It just feels to me that this should be a standard solved problem, either provided by the API, or by a library everyone uses near universally. I'm guessing the fact it's not the case means there's too many complex edge cases (but I could easily envisage a library telling me to provide it a function to call if there's a connectivity issue, and me being able to simply implement my desired logic to pop a little warning above the content, showing an exclamation mark and saying there are gremlins and content might be stale.
flukus 6y ago
> That was a fixed non-resizable layout, showing static content. It eventually morphed into the Windows Forms builder which handled dynamic layouts quite well, if a little different to most. Elements could be "anchored" to specific points of their container, so you button 10px off the bottom left would always be 10px off the bottom left, elements you wanted to grow to fill available space could be anchored on either side. All handled well by the visual designer. Generally I prefer the gtk/qt method of just writing code, but the forms builder works really well too, both options are much better than the xml mess that is android and windows development these days.
- int_19h 6y ago
  This actually predates Windows Forms - it's the model used by Delphi/VCL (and these days, Lazarus). However, anchors are nowhere near as flexible as layout managers, and there are many things that they can't handle. For example, when localizing UI, length of labels can change substantially, which requires the other controls that they're labeling to be moved around.
fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
Delphi definitely handles resizable layouts and data loading nicely: I’ve played around with again via Lazarus, and the experience is much nicer than any alternative I’ve seen, even for complicated layouts.

g_p 6y ago

Thanks for mentioning Jetpack Compose - not something I had heard of. Sounds like there is a growing trend towards declarative UI models, and that doesn't seem too bad. I don't particularly take offence with using XML to define the UI as such, but the clunky integration with Java was what annoyed me. Agreed regarding the limitations of VB6 to static and non resizeable content, though I suppose from a developer perspective it worked nicely. It just seems genuinely strange we haven't seen innovation to improve on the UI design side. Maybe the declarative shift will give us this though! Regarding the dynamic fetching and challenges there, absolutely this is the new challenge for an app model. But equally, surely this kind of logic is now the new "boilerplate"? Most apps need (or would benefit from) some kind of smart lazy loading. Can totally get my head around that, and clearly we need to work asynchronously. But I've never really seen anything that fit the bill for solving this, and it never felt like Android was trying to improve it itself. To my mind the API should be elegant to the point of near invisibility, for simple tasks - assuming I already know the URL to fetch from and any HTTP Auth is handled by my HTTP library, in an ideal world, I'd just say where to get the "data stuff" from, and then tell it what to do when that happens. In this ideal world, caching helps to keep the UI responsive (and fresh) with minimum need to tweak this unless I want to. It just feels to me that this should be a standard solved problem, either provided by the API, or by a library everyone uses near universally. I'm guessing the fact it's not the case means there's too many complex edge cases (but I could easily envisage a library telling me to provide it a function to call if there's a connectivity issue, and me being able to simply implement my desired logic to pop a little warning above the content, showing an exclamation mark and saying there are gremlins and content might be stale.

flukus 6y ago

> That was a fixed non-resizable layout, showing static content. It eventually morphed into the Windows Forms builder which handled dynamic layouts quite well, if a little different to most. Elements could be "anchored" to specific points of their container, so you button 10px off the bottom left would always be 10px off the bottom left, elements you wanted to grow to fill available space could be anchored on either side. All handled well by the visual designer. Generally I prefer the gtk/qt method of just writing code, but the forms builder works really well too, both options are much better than the xml mess that is android and windows development these days.

int_19h 6y ago
This actually predates Windows Forms - it's the model used by Delphi/VCL (and these days, Lazarus). However, anchors are nowhere near as flexible as layout managers, and there are many things that they can't handle. For example, when localizing UI, length of labels can change substantially, which requires the other controls that they're labeling to be moved around.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago

Delphi definitely handles resizable layouts and data loading nicely: I’ve played around with again via Lazarus, and the experience is much nicer than any alternative I’ve seen, even for complicated layouts.