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>there's almost no native-feeling cross-platform UI library for native apps at the moment wxWidgets is native and it has been working for decades now. May be s

by Shorel 11y ago

>there's almost no native-feeling cross-platform UI library for native apps at the moment wxWidgets is native and it has been working for decades now. May be some people disagree with its use of macros, but it certainly works, runs fast and it's native in Windows, OSX and Linux. I repeat it again. It's not only native-feeling. It uses the native controls in each platform it supports. It is fully native.

gull 11y ago
I'm curious about this. Does something like wxWidgets offer all widgets that are available in an OS? Does it offer the files listing widget the Mac has in that fourth mode, where flipping between files shows on top an extra area that feels like flipping between music CDs? I guess the point is, what do you do with widgets available in one OS that aren't available in another? Should UI libraries keep up?
- Shorel 11y ago
  It keeps up in some cases, as some dialog options are only available for one platform and ignored in the rest. But it is updated slowly, i.e. the platform has a new widget and the corresponding wxWidgets update happens several months later. You can check for example Audacity in your platform and evaluate if it feels native enough.
comex 11y ago
It is more native than toolkits which try to recreate the controls themselves. But I would not call it "fully native", because it does not let you write cross-platform fully native-feeling apps. It fails at that for the simple reason that that is impossible: different platforms have different UI conventions, including icon appearance, controls with no direct equivalents on other platforms, or with equivalents that have subtle differences in usage, idioms and standard layouts, behavior of keyboard shortcuts and gestures, use of platform-specific features, etc. If you do not spend a significant amount of time tuning your UI for each, you may end up with something that's 80% right, but it will never be 100% right. Also, wxWidgets has had a lot of problems lately on OS X: high-DPI not being supported properly for years, broken focus, other bugs. It's not just the macros that make it an icky framework, which I say from unfortunate first-hand experience.

by Shorel 11y ago

gull 11y ago

I'm curious about this. Does something like wxWidgets offer all widgets that are available in an OS? Does it offer the files listing widget the Mac has in that fourth mode, where flipping between files shows on top an extra area that feels like flipping between music CDs? I guess the point is, what do you do with widgets available in one OS that aren't available in another? Should UI libraries keep up?

Shorel 11y ago
It keeps up in some cases, as some dialog options are only available for one platform and ignored in the rest. But it is updated slowly, i.e. the platform has a new widget and the corresponding wxWidgets update happens several months later. You can check for example Audacity in your platform and evaluate if it feels native enough.

comex 11y ago

It is more native than toolkits which try to recreate the controls themselves. But I would not call it "fully native", because it does not let you write cross-platform fully native-feeling apps. It fails at that for the simple reason that that is impossible: different platforms have different UI conventions, including icon appearance, controls with no direct equivalents on other platforms, or with equivalents that have subtle differences in usage, idioms and standard layouts, behavior of keyboard shortcuts and gestures, use of platform-specific features, etc. If you do not spend a significant amount of time tuning your UI for each, you may end up with something that's 80% right, but it will never be 100% right. Also, wxWidgets has had a lot of problems lately on OS X: high-DPI not being supported properly for years, broken focus, other bugs. It's not just the macros that make it an icky framework, which I say from unfortunate first-hand experience.