3 ms·

One of the problems is ALL of the toolkits suck. Just try creating a Qt5 application in Python, it's a royal pain in the ass compared to HTML+CSS, especially if

by dheera 4y ago

One of the problems is ALL of the toolkits suck. Just try creating a Qt5 application in Python, it's a royal pain in the ass compared to HTML+CSS, especially if you want to get things aligned in a certain way, e.g. having an widget always be the window height minus a certain fixed number of points, or 33% of the width minus 20 points, or something of that sort. Native widgets are also just design-wise ages behind web widgets. Rounded corners and a slight blurred drop shadow? Forget it.

JanisErdmanis 4y ago
Have you tried QML? It has options for alignment, and the reactivity built-in is just beautiful.
- bombolo 4y ago
  qwidget has layouts too. He probably tried to use qt for about 3 minutes and gave up.
wvenable 4y ago
XAML toolkits on Windows have the same issue -- styling stuff is an esoteric nightmare compared to HTML/CSS. And HTML/CSS is hardly the easiest way to do stuff and yet it's still better than what most desktop toolkits give us.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Could you just, stop styling shit and let your application look like the rest of the damned computer does? FFS, in 1995 styling was something the user did to applications, now it is a way for developers to mangle the fucking GUI so they can look 'unique' and 'on brand'. Fuck this entire goddamned industry.
  - tabtab 4y ago
    > Could you just, stop styling shit That's part of the problem, eye-candy sells, but carries a complexity tax with it. Oracle Forms was butt-ugly, but got the every-day CRUD/GUI job done good-enough and was quick to develop with. Oracle Forms dev's ran circles around our web devs in terms of productivity. I looked into why, and Oracle Forms just required less code and less keystrokes to make apps and apps changes. (Oracle ruined OF when they rewrote the GUI client/browser into Java from C. Otherwise, OF would still be common. I don't like Oracle the company, but OF was magical productivity.) KISS style = KISS stack.
  - dheera 4y ago
    > rest of the damned computer does? The rest of the computer looks like shit. The Gnome 43 file browser, for example, is an abomination of microscopic buttons. Try hunting down the "new folder" button, it's hidden under a "..." menu that isn't the hamburger menu and isn't another dropdown menu. Macs and Windows aren't much better. I haven't used Word in ages, had to use it for something yesterday at work, and when I hit "Save As" it did seemingly nothing, after some fumbling I realized clicking "Save As" added a very unrecognizable "Save As" icon to the fucking titlebar. I have no idea whose horrible idea it was to put some buttons in the title bar and some buttons in the toolbar instead of all the buttons in one place.
    - bombolo 4y ago
      > The rest of the computer looks like shit. Except when I change theme, it all looks nice except your shitty electron app.
  - wvenable 4y ago
    > Could you just, stop styling shit and let your application look like the rest of the damned computer does? Nope. I'm not making a word processor. I was trying to match the application look and feel to the product and to other applications for that product. It might suck to you but having a graphical application look like Notepad is not what anyone wants.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      Citation needed. Looking like notepad is not what you or whatever high-on-their-own-farts developers want. Looking consistent with all the other software on my computer is what I, and many others, want. Sadly there are too many people like you in our industry so it will continue to suck.
      - wvenable 4y ago
        What does it even mean to look like all the other software on a computer? None of my software looks anything like any of the other software. A white background application with a menu bar and some dialogs would look more out of place. None of that even applies to software used to remote control a robot and mostly used by children who's primary other computer is a mobile phone or tablet.
        jen20 4y ago
        > None of my software looks anything like any of the other software. Largely because of people with opinions like yours. It’s not that long ago that this was not the case. Children are not idiots and they do not need things dumbing down for them.
        dheera 4y ago
        > Children are not idiots and they do not need things dumbing down for them. No but if the next door app is shinier and more colorful they will go for it over your grey buttons, and you will lose business.
rbanffy 4y ago
> if you want to get things aligned in a certain way I want things to align as the native GUI does. I don't want apps that break my assumptions about what the UI should be and how buttons should present and where they should be. Then, if the app is running on a different platform, it's reasonable for the users to expect it to adhere to their own UI conventions. This is why a lot of toolkits will restrict the way you shape your UI elements - they are the layer that imposes consistency.
- raincole 4y ago
  But most cross-platform native apps I've seen don't feel like "native GUI" at all. Blender doesn't. Godot doesn't. Krita doesn't. Maybe it's an OSS thing?
  - jen20 4y ago
    No, it’s a “product manager who wants their apps to look the same everywhere rather than respecting users” thing.
- dheera 4y ago
  > as the native GUI does The native GUI does nothing. If you lay out something and resize the window to be smaller, your GUI will just get cropped, and there will be buttons offscreen. That's not a good experience. Also when you have, say, a chatroom where you have a huge box of scrolling content and then an entry area, you typically want the entry area to be constant height and the scrolling content to fill the remaining space, whereas there are other applications where you might want a percentage-based split. The native GUI doesn't know you want this. You have to somehow tell it that. CSS makes it super easy. Other toolkits make it very annoying to specify logic like this.
  - ridiculous_fish 4y ago
    All native GUI toolkits from the last three decades allow you to reflow elements in the way you describe. Both CSS and native toolkits make it simple to express how elements move and stretch in response to window resizing. Where CSS falls down is anything user-resizable. For example, a split view that collapses instead of cropping a text label. The CSS "resize" property is awful.
rwalle 4y ago
Have done some Qt5 development, can confirm. Qt is nowhere as expressive and flexible as the web stack. Not to mention the ecosystem, license etc. Most people trashing JavaScript, Electron or web stack have never done cross-platform desktop application development and they will never understand how much worse other stack can be.

by dheera 4y ago

JanisErdmanis 4y ago

Have you tried QML? It has options for alignment, and the reactivity built-in is just beautiful.

bombolo 4y ago
qwidget has layouts too. He probably tried to use qt for about 3 minutes and gave up.

wvenable 4y ago

XAML toolkits on Windows have the same issue -- styling stuff is an esoteric nightmare compared to HTML/CSS. And HTML/CSS is hardly the easiest way to do stuff and yet it's still better than what most desktop toolkits give us.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Could you just, stop styling shit and let your application look like the rest of the damned computer does? FFS, in 1995 styling was something the user did to applications, now it is a way for developers to mangle the fucking GUI so they can look 'unique' and 'on brand'. Fuck this entire goddamned industry.
- tabtab 4y ago
  > Could you just, stop styling shit That's part of the problem, eye-candy sells, but carries a complexity tax with it. Oracle Forms was butt-ugly, but got the every-day CRUD/GUI job done good-enough and was quick to develop with. Oracle Forms dev's ran circles around our web devs in terms of productivity. I looked into why, and Oracle Forms just required less code and less keystrokes to make apps and apps changes. (Oracle ruined OF when they rewrote the GUI client/browser into Java from C. Otherwise, OF would still be common. I don't like Oracle the company, but OF was magical productivity.) KISS style = KISS stack.
- dheera 4y ago
  > rest of the damned computer does? The rest of the computer looks like shit. The Gnome 43 file browser, for example, is an abomination of microscopic buttons. Try hunting down the "new folder" button, it's hidden under a "..." menu that isn't the hamburger menu and isn't another dropdown menu. Macs and Windows aren't much better. I haven't used Word in ages, had to use it for something yesterday at work, and when I hit "Save As" it did seemingly nothing, after some fumbling I realized clicking "Save As" added a very unrecognizable "Save As" icon to the fucking titlebar. I have no idea whose horrible idea it was to put some buttons in the title bar and some buttons in the toolbar instead of all the buttons in one place.
  - bombolo 4y ago
    > The rest of the computer looks like shit. Except when I change theme, it all looks nice except your shitty electron app.
- wvenable 4y ago
  > Could you just, stop styling shit and let your application look like the rest of the damned computer does? Nope. I'm not making a word processor. I was trying to match the application look and feel to the product and to other applications for that product. It might suck to you but having a graphical application look like Notepad is not what anyone wants.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    Citation needed. Looking like notepad is not what you or whatever high-on-their-own-farts developers want. Looking consistent with all the other software on my computer is what I, and many others, want. Sadly there are too many people like you in our industry so it will continue to suck.
    - wvenable 4y ago
      What does it even mean to look like all the other software on a computer? None of my software looks anything like any of the other software. A white background application with a menu bar and some dialogs would look more out of place. None of that even applies to software used to remote control a robot and mostly used by children who's primary other computer is a mobile phone or tablet.
      - jen20 4y ago
        > None of my software looks anything like any of the other software. Largely because of people with opinions like yours. It’s not that long ago that this was not the case. Children are not idiots and they do not need things dumbing down for them.
        dheera 4y ago
        > Children are not idiots and they do not need things dumbing down for them. No but if the next door app is shinier and more colorful they will go for it over your grey buttons, and you will lose business.

rbanffy 4y ago

> if you want to get things aligned in a certain way I want things to align as the native GUI does. I don't want apps that break my assumptions about what the UI should be and how buttons should present and where they should be. Then, if the app is running on a different platform, it's reasonable for the users to expect it to adhere to their own UI conventions. This is why a lot of toolkits will restrict the way you shape your UI elements - they are the layer that imposes consistency.

raincole 4y ago
But most cross-platform native apps I've seen don't feel like "native GUI" at all. Blender doesn't. Godot doesn't. Krita doesn't. Maybe it's an OSS thing?
- jen20 4y ago
  No, it’s a “product manager who wants their apps to look the same everywhere rather than respecting users” thing.
dheera 4y ago
> as the native GUI does The native GUI does nothing. If you lay out something and resize the window to be smaller, your GUI will just get cropped, and there will be buttons offscreen. That's not a good experience. Also when you have, say, a chatroom where you have a huge box of scrolling content and then an entry area, you typically want the entry area to be constant height and the scrolling content to fill the remaining space, whereas there are other applications where you might want a percentage-based split. The native GUI doesn't know you want this. You have to somehow tell it that. CSS makes it super easy. Other toolkits make it very annoying to specify logic like this.
- ridiculous_fish 4y ago
  All native GUI toolkits from the last three decades allow you to reflow elements in the way you describe. Both CSS and native toolkits make it simple to express how elements move and stretch in response to window resizing. Where CSS falls down is anything user-resizable. For example, a split view that collapses instead of cropping a text label. The CSS "resize" property is awful.

rwalle 4y ago

Have done some Qt5 development, can confirm. Qt is nowhere as expressive and flexible as the web stack. Not to mention the ecosystem, license etc. Most people trashing JavaScript, Electron or web stack have never done cross-platform desktop application development and they will never understand how much worse other stack can be.