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> Cross-platform development is known to suck. I'm getting tired of people saying this when it just isn't very true. There are multiple GUI toolkits that are c

> Cross-platform development is known to suck. I'm getting tired of people saying this when it just isn't very true. There are multiple GUI toolkits that are cross platform, WYSIWYG cross-platform GUI designers like Lazarus, Java, and just plain old writing GUI code for multiple targets. Christ people, we used to ship computer games on 5+ different platforms with wildly different graphics and sound hardware and different instruction sets in an era where you often didn't get the luxury of writing things in a compiled language if you wanted them to perform! Also, there's an argument to be made that most programs have no need to be cross platform in the first place. I'm not saying cross-platform is trivial, but it isn't some impossibly herculean task either.

bsder 5y ago
> There are multiple GUI toolkits that are cross platform, WYSIWYG cross-platform GUI designers like Lazarus, Java, and just plain old writing GUI code for multiple targets. And they all kinda look and work like crap? Take a look at Kicad (no offense to the Kicad folks--it's just something cross-platform that I'm intimately familiar with and use every day), for example, and tell me anybody would hold it up as an exemplar of cross-platform GUI development. Tk is cross-platform and cross-language, and all everybody does is complain about how it looks like crap. Blender thought GUI toolkits were so useless that they grew their own. No Digital Audio Workstation uses any mainstream GUI toolkit. I can go on and on and on. As for computer games, they are a completely different beast. Computer games take over the whole screen, proscribe your input interface, and generally limit your ability to interact with text or graphical elements. GUI is a whole lot easier if you don't have to deal with text.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  That is a consequence of not having proper UI/UX people on the team.
  - bsder 5y ago
    And? What's the best way to get proper UI/UX people? Write in some obscure language and GUI toolkit and pray that 1 of the 5 in the world will join your project? Or change the language/toolkit to the one where the greatest concentration of UI/UX people already exist? Programming, especially open source, is a social as well as a technical problem.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      To pay them would be a good starting point.

bsder 5y ago

> There are multiple GUI toolkits that are cross platform, WYSIWYG cross-platform GUI designers like Lazarus, Java, and just plain old writing GUI code for multiple targets. And they all kinda look and work like crap? Take a look at Kicad (no offense to the Kicad folks--it's just something cross-platform that I'm intimately familiar with and use every day), for example, and tell me anybody would hold it up as an exemplar of cross-platform GUI development. Tk is cross-platform and cross-language, and all everybody does is complain about how it looks like crap. Blender thought GUI toolkits were so useless that they grew their own. No Digital Audio Workstation uses any mainstream GUI toolkit. I can go on and on and on. As for computer games, they are a completely different beast. Computer games take over the whole screen, proscribe your input interface, and generally limit your ability to interact with text or graphical elements. GUI is a whole lot easier if you don't have to deal with text.

pjmlp 5y ago
That is a consequence of not having proper UI/UX people on the team.
- bsder 5y ago
  And? What's the best way to get proper UI/UX people? Write in some obscure language and GUI toolkit and pray that 1 of the 5 in the world will join your project? Or change the language/toolkit to the one where the greatest concentration of UI/UX people already exist? Programming, especially open source, is a social as well as a technical problem.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    To pay them would be a good starting point.