4 ms·
There's tons of easy ways to develop gui apps, many easier than Electron. tk and Racket come to mind.
by smabie 6y ago
There's tons of easy ways to develop gui apps, many easier than Electron. tk and Racket come to mind.
- Const-me 6y agoI have nothing against TK or Racket. I haven’t used these two in particular, but I used equivalents like Windows Forms or wxWidgets, and I was happy with both. However, they only work when you don’t have high bar for visual quality, are happy with stock OS-provided controls with minimal customizations, and don’t have too much GUI in general. GP mentioned styling and visual debugger. Styling is needed for projects where you have a professionally-made GUI design on input (i.e. Photoshop or Illustrator or XD, or much less often non-Adobe equivalents), and want to make GUI close to that design. Such projects often include custom UX in addition to custom GUI, like animated transitions or decent touch screen integration for custom controls. Similarly, visual debuggers are only needed when you have very complex GUI, and/or non-trivial UX code. Other typical requirements for high-quality GUI are internationalization (Unicode all the way down including these surrogate pairs and ideally colored fonts, support for right-to-left languages), and good DPI scaling (this requires vector graphics for assets instead of bitmaps). I don’t like Electron nor JavaScript, but I have to admit they are often the best tool for the job. QT is close, but requires C++ with all the unsafe shenanigans, and depending on the project the license can be expensive.
- ants_a 6y agoQt can be developed with Python or JavaScript too. And there are other third party bindings available. [1] [1] https://wiki.qt.io/Language_Bindings https://wiki.qt.io/Language_Bindings