5 ms·

Yep. We recently did an assessment of available UI libraries and pretty much concluded the best maintained libraries with a modern look and feel are all web-foc

by arsome 5y ago

Yep. We recently did an assessment of available UI libraries and pretty much concluded the best maintained libraries with a modern look and feel are all web-focused and we're likely to have to settle for building an electron app if we want to be able to take advantage of the best selection of 3rd party libraries without building as much ourselves. As much as I don't like the ecosystem or Javascript as a language, there's so much tooling around it and the libraries available seem to be miles ahead of other options. I'm hoping Redux and TypeScript can make it moderately bearable. Fingers crossed. Seriously, what is there? Microsoft doesn't even have a clear direction for desktop apps - their most recent stuff like VS Code and Teams are built on Electron.

bhauer 5y ago
Redux making something "bearable" is confusing.
nahuel0x 5y ago
was Flutter included in the comparison?
- arsome 5y ago
  I did look at Flutter but pretty much concluded that it was still fairly immature and didn't have great 3rd party libraries available for things like graphing and data tables (sort, filter, group, etc, with all the UI work done for you). This was a year or two ago so things may have improved since, but in React-land there's plenty of very capable and well maintained options in both the commercial and open source world.
theteapot 5y ago
Redux?! Bearable?! What is happening?!
girvo 5y ago
Tbh if you're living in React-land and understand Redux, useReducer with useContext has subsumed the need for it in nearly all cases for myself and my team. For the parts it doesn't match, truly global stuff or tonnes of mutation, MobX is nicer out of the box than Redux. Redux can be just as nice and in some ways more powerful, but thats only after installing and configuring X amount of middlewares, with all the type confusion that can add :(
- arsome 5y ago
  Interesting, I did look at MobX briefly but pretty quickly concluded it seemed like overkill for our use case where Redux, Redux Toolkit and Thunk would pretty much solve everything we needed and seemed comparatively simple to follow, I'll definitely take a look into useReducer and useContext though, that looks like a potentially viable option for the majority of cases.
  - chrisweekly 5y ago
    I've got experience with MobX (from about 3y ago) and more recent experience with RTK. I still feel that MobX is easier to reason about -- but RTK is a big improvement over vanilla Redux. /$.02
    - acemarke 5y ago
      Out of curiosity, any particular concerns with RTK? Also interested in hearing any specifics about how MobX is "easier to reason about" for you.
- acemarke 5y ago
  Fortunately, you no longer need to "install a bunch of middleware" yourself - Redux Toolkit's `configureStore` gives you a good default setup out of the box [0], and we have TypeScript usage guidelines that infer all the needed state and dispatch types automatically [1] It's also worth noting that there are some significant difference between `useReducer+useContext` and Redux. Not saying those are bad and that you should avoid them : ) just that it's important to understand the intended use cases and technical behavior differences [2]. [0] https://redux.js.org/tutorials/fundamentals/part-8-modern-redux#store-setup https://redux.js.org/tutorials/fundamentals/part-8-modern-re... [1] https://redux.js.org/recipes/usage-with-typescript https://redux.js.org/recipes/usage-with-typescript [2] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2021/01/context-redux-differences/ https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2021/01/context-redux-diff...
  - girvo 5y ago
7thaccount 5y ago
If you're building a desktop app, just plain C# in visual studio has an extremely powerful GUI (WinForms) that is fairly easy to use. Lots of widgets abs very good charts and graphs that you can zoom-in on and annotate in a million ways. It's miles ahead of Python (saying this as a Python guy). Click Once means installs are fairly simple (assuming a Windows deployment).
- arsome 5y ago
  That's true, but it seems like WinForms is basically a dead end at this point, not much maintenance work is put into it and you have to jump through some serious hoops to make basic stuff like DPI scaling work even last I checked. Completely agree though, the 3rd party component story is very good on .NET, but the applications you're producing don't exactly have a modern look and feel unless you're investing serious UI design effort in them on top of things. WPF (and whatever they've taken to calling the UWP version of it now) is a little more modern, and it's what I was initially leaning towards, but also doesn't seem to be moving much and it feels like the future is very unclear, while even MS themselves have started putting out Electron apps. It really doesn't breed confidence.
  - nxc18 5y ago
    Coming off of an extremely disappointing Build - I don’t think any news even made it to HN this year, and not a peep about desktop - I agree that the future is unclear. WinUI is the future, but they’ve admitted it will be years before it reaches the maturity of UWP, which is embarrassingly bad even 5 years on. WPF, in my opinion, is the best choice for “native” windows apps. The actual best choice is Electron, as most teams doing new work at MS have noticed. WPF, for native, hits the sweet spot of supporting newer technology (high DPI), having decent performance, and being well implemented; it has been solid for at least 10 years now. Also easy to style and theme, similar in concept to web, but just more annoying.
    - thrower123 5y ago
      I was too busy this week to watch any of the Build stuff, but it is surprising how it's basically just been crickets. I can't remember a year with less buzz about anything that Microsoft has queued up...
acemarke 5y ago
Hi, I'm a Redux maintainer. Note that we have considerably changed the Redux patterns that we teach over the last couple years to make it easier for folks to learn and use Redux. We now teach using our Redux Toolkit package as the default way to write Redux logic [0], and the React-Redux hooks API [1] as the standard way to work with Redux in React components. We recently rewrote our tutorials from scratch [2], and offer an opinionated set of guidelines on how to write Redux code effectively [3], such as "put all Redux logic for one feature in a single file", "use feature folders", and "prefer putting logic in reducers". We also now recommend some TypeScript usage patterns [4] that simplify the amount of types you have to write. Finally, we are about to release a new "RTK Query" data fetching layer that will be in the upcoming RTK 1.6 release [5]. It's in beta now [6], and we're just polishing the docs before it goes live. Hopefully this will help you and anyone else who's using Redux! [0] https://redux.js.org/tutorials/essentials/part-2-app-structure https://redux.js.org/tutorials/essentials/part-2-app-structu... [1] https://react-redux.js.org/api/hooks https://react-redux.js.org/api/hooks [2] https://redux.js.org/tutorials/index https://redux.js.org/tutorials/index [3] https://redux.js.org/style-guide/style-guide https://redux.js.org/style-guide/style-guide [4] https://redux.js.org/recipes/usage-with-typescript https://redux.js.org/recipes/usage-with-typescript [5] https://deploy-preview-1016--redux-starter-kit-docs.netlify.app/rtk-query/overview https://deploy-preview-1016--redux-starter-kit-docs.netlify.... [6] https://github.com/reduxjs/redux-toolkit/releases/tag/v1.6.0-beta.0 https://github.com/reduxjs/redux-toolkit/releases/tag/v1.6.0...
- arsome 5y ago
  Just wanted to say thanks for Redux Toolkit and the hooks API - they were truly the key features in making me consider it a solid benefit with TypeScript integration in mind and getting the interest of colleagues who were less familiar with the ecosystem.
  - acemarke 5y ago
    Glad those are working well for you! Yeah, one of the reasons we recommend the hooks API as the default _is_ because it's so much easier to use with TS. It's _possible_ to use `connect` with TS, but the typing overloads are a complete pain to work with. Fortunately, `useSelector` is just a simple function call, and `useDispatch` just gives you the `dispatch` method itself. Less abstraction, easier to type correctly, and easier to use.
mixmastamyk 5y ago
Think of MS stuff from top to bottom as on maintenance, plus a little extra. Less investment than in the old days as foundational tech is becoming commoditized. The focus and revenue is from cloud now, since MS has comparatively little hardware or advertising profits. Develop desktop apps in something focused on it, such as QT. Flutter may mature.
adwn 5y ago
> Seriously, what is there? Take a look at Sciter [1]. You build your UI using HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and your application logic in any language with a C FFI [2], and it supports Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and Android. The distribution size is tiny: only a single dynamic library of around 10 MiB. It's not open source, though. [1] https://sciter.com/ https://sciter.com/ [2] Available bindings, apart from C and C++: https://sciter.com/developers/sciter-sdk-bindings/ https://sciter.com/developers/sciter-sdk-bindings/
pjmlp 5y ago
The likes of DevExpress, ComponentOne, Telerik and friends.

by arsome 5y ago

bhauer 5y ago

Redux making something "bearable" is confusing.

nahuel0x 5y ago

was Flutter included in the comparison?

arsome 5y ago
I did look at Flutter but pretty much concluded that it was still fairly immature and didn't have great 3rd party libraries available for things like graphing and data tables (sort, filter, group, etc, with all the UI work done for you). This was a year or two ago so things may have improved since, but in React-land there's plenty of very capable and well maintained options in both the commercial and open source world.

theteapot 5y ago

Redux?! Bearable?! What is happening?!

girvo 5y ago

Tbh if you're living in React-land and understand Redux, useReducer with useContext has subsumed the need for it in nearly all cases for myself and my team. For the parts it doesn't match, truly global stuff or tonnes of mutation, MobX is nicer out of the box than Redux. Redux can be just as nice and in some ways more powerful, but thats only after installing and configuring X amount of middlewares, with all the type confusion that can add :(

arsome 5y ago
Interesting, I did look at MobX briefly but pretty quickly concluded it seemed like overkill for our use case where Redux, Redux Toolkit and Thunk would pretty much solve everything we needed and seemed comparatively simple to follow, I'll definitely take a look into useReducer and useContext though, that looks like a potentially viable option for the majority of cases.
- chrisweekly 5y ago
  I've got experience with MobX (from about 3y ago) and more recent experience with RTK. I still feel that MobX is easier to reason about -- but RTK is a big improvement over vanilla Redux. /$.02
  - acemarke 5y ago
    Out of curiosity, any particular concerns with RTK? Also interested in hearing any specifics about how MobX is "easier to reason about" for you.
acemarke 5y ago
Fortunately, you no longer need to "install a bunch of middleware" yourself - Redux Toolkit's `configureStore` gives you a good default setup out of the box [0], and we have TypeScript usage guidelines that infer all the needed state and dispatch types automatically [1] It's also worth noting that there are some significant difference between `useReducer+useContext` and Redux. Not saying those are bad and that you should avoid them : ) just that it's important to understand the intended use cases and technical behavior differences [2]. [0] https://redux.js.org/tutorials/fundamentals/part-8-modern-redux#store-setup https://redux.js.org/tutorials/fundamentals/part-8-modern-re... [1] https://redux.js.org/recipes/usage-with-typescript https://redux.js.org/recipes/usage-with-typescript [2] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2021/01/context-redux-differences/ https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2021/01/context-redux-diff...
- girvo 5y ago

7thaccount 5y ago

If you're building a desktop app, just plain C# in visual studio has an extremely powerful GUI (WinForms) that is fairly easy to use. Lots of widgets abs very good charts and graphs that you can zoom-in on and annotate in a million ways. It's miles ahead of Python (saying this as a Python guy). Click Once means installs are fairly simple (assuming a Windows deployment).

arsome 5y ago
That's true, but it seems like WinForms is basically a dead end at this point, not much maintenance work is put into it and you have to jump through some serious hoops to make basic stuff like DPI scaling work even last I checked. Completely agree though, the 3rd party component story is very good on .NET, but the applications you're producing don't exactly have a modern look and feel unless you're investing serious UI design effort in them on top of things. WPF (and whatever they've taken to calling the UWP version of it now) is a little more modern, and it's what I was initially leaning towards, but also doesn't seem to be moving much and it feels like the future is very unclear, while even MS themselves have started putting out Electron apps. It really doesn't breed confidence.
- nxc18 5y ago
  Coming off of an extremely disappointing Build - I don’t think any news even made it to HN this year, and not a peep about desktop - I agree that the future is unclear. WinUI is the future, but they’ve admitted it will be years before it reaches the maturity of UWP, which is embarrassingly bad even 5 years on. WPF, in my opinion, is the best choice for “native” windows apps. The actual best choice is Electron, as most teams doing new work at MS have noticed. WPF, for native, hits the sweet spot of supporting newer technology (high DPI), having decent performance, and being well implemented; it has been solid for at least 10 years now. Also easy to style and theme, similar in concept to web, but just more annoying.
  - thrower123 5y ago
    I was too busy this week to watch any of the Build stuff, but it is surprising how it's basically just been crickets. I can't remember a year with less buzz about anything that Microsoft has queued up...

acemarke 5y ago

Hi, I'm a Redux maintainer. Note that we have considerably changed the Redux patterns that we teach over the last couple years to make it easier for folks to learn and use Redux. We now teach using our Redux Toolkit package as the default way to write Redux logic [0], and the React-Redux hooks API [1] as the standard way to work with Redux in React components. We recently rewrote our tutorials from scratch [2], and offer an opinionated set of guidelines on how to write Redux code effectively [3], such as "put all Redux logic for one feature in a single file", "use feature folders", and "prefer putting logic in reducers". We also now recommend some TypeScript usage patterns [4] that simplify the amount of types you have to write. Finally, we are about to release a new "RTK Query" data fetching layer that will be in the upcoming RTK 1.6 release [5]. It's in beta now [6], and we're just polishing the docs before it goes live. Hopefully this will help you and anyone else who's using Redux! [0] https://redux.js.org/tutorials/essentials/part-2-app-structure https://redux.js.org/tutorials/essentials/part-2-app-structu... [1] https://react-redux.js.org/api/hooks https://react-redux.js.org/api/hooks [2] https://redux.js.org/tutorials/index https://redux.js.org/tutorials/index [3] https://redux.js.org/style-guide/style-guide https://redux.js.org/style-guide/style-guide [4] https://redux.js.org/recipes/usage-with-typescript https://redux.js.org/recipes/usage-with-typescript [5] https://deploy-preview-1016--redux-starter-kit-docs.netlify.app/rtk-query/overview https://deploy-preview-1016--redux-starter-kit-docs.netlify.... [6] https://github.com/reduxjs/redux-toolkit/releases/tag/v1.6.0-beta.0 https://github.com/reduxjs/redux-toolkit/releases/tag/v1.6.0...

arsome 5y ago
Just wanted to say thanks for Redux Toolkit and the hooks API - they were truly the key features in making me consider it a solid benefit with TypeScript integration in mind and getting the interest of colleagues who were less familiar with the ecosystem.
- acemarke 5y ago
  Glad those are working well for you! Yeah, one of the reasons we recommend the hooks API as the default _is_ because it's so much easier to use with TS. It's _possible_ to use `connect` with TS, but the typing overloads are a complete pain to work with. Fortunately, `useSelector` is just a simple function call, and `useDispatch` just gives you the `dispatch` method itself. Less abstraction, easier to type correctly, and easier to use.

mixmastamyk 5y ago

Think of MS stuff from top to bottom as on maintenance, plus a little extra. Less investment than in the old days as foundational tech is becoming commoditized. The focus and revenue is from cloud now, since MS has comparatively little hardware or advertising profits. Develop desktop apps in something focused on it, such as QT. Flutter may mature.

adwn 5y ago

> Seriously, what is there? Take a look at Sciter [1]. You build your UI using HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and your application logic in any language with a C FFI [2], and it supports Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and Android. The distribution size is tiny: only a single dynamic library of around 10 MiB. It's not open source, though. [1] https://sciter.com/ https://sciter.com/ [2] Available bindings, apart from C and C++: https://sciter.com/developers/sciter-sdk-bindings/ https://sciter.com/developers/sciter-sdk-bindings/

pjmlp 5y ago

The likes of DevExpress, ComponentOne, Telerik and friends.