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Ok, let's try to say "the glass is already 20% full, not 80% empty" - there are still lots of things missing, but hey, it's still early days... My pet peeve wi

by rob74 5y ago

Ok, let's try to say "the glass is already 20% full, not 80% empty" - there are still lots of things missing, but hey, it's still early days... My pet peeve with most "home-grown" GUI frameworks is relatively subtle and probably hard to implement, but it's an example why developing a GUI framework (especially a platform-independent one) from scratch is hard: no subpixel rendering for text (only "classic" antialiasing). This makes these UIs look strange on a "normal-DPI" monitor (which are getting rarer these days, but I still have some and I'm not gonna throw them away anytime soon).

throwaway894345 5y ago
Agreed. I always think I’ll one day build my own UI framework. Drawing to the screen and computing layouts is manageable, but then I think about the details: widget focus, text selection, platform keyboard shortcuts, text rendering (which encompasses things like right-to-left text rendering, ligatures, and a million other hateful complexities), etc and I realize why there are so few toolkits out there. I do think it would be interesting to define a minimal set of user interface conventions that would forego a lot of features but would allow developers to stand a fighting chance of building a UI toolkit. If it became popular enough, users could come to understand its conventions even if they aren’t platform native (not ideal, but something has to change).