121–130 of 136 posts
Tauri seems interesting. It combines a Rust core with the platform-native browser engine for presentation. Of course a potential downside is rendering incompatibilities between engines/platforms.
Lazarus is the open source equivalent to Delphi these days, and for the most part it's awesome. (The documentation, on the other hand... just isn't fit for purpose) I've been using Visual Studio Code and Github Copilot together, and it seems to work ok. I've not used it heavily, though, as I'm retired.
Delphi is the easiest and most integrated way of writing cross platform UIs and it has been for a lot of years. It might not be sexy, but highly productive. You can download and use a community edition of Delphi for free. The downside is insane licensing costs if you are making commercial software. I an not sure how far Lazarus has come but I believe it to have the same or similar abilities and if free and libre.
Nowadays I definitely prefer Lazarus.
Lazarus is the open source equivalent to Delphi these days, and for the most part it's awesome. (The documentation, on the other hand... just isn't fit for purpose) I've been using Visual Studio Code and Github Copilot together, and it seems to work ok. I've not used it heavily, though, as I'm retired.
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Does LÖVE have support for widgets/ controls (such as labels, text boxes, combo boxes, etc.) for building GUI desktop apps, or is it only for 2D graphics? I could not make that out, on a quick look just now at the homepage and the various modules listed there.
There's a GUI library: https://github.com/flamendless/Slab In general, if you use a minority platform you have to assume it has a tiny minority testing it and so budget for there to be more bugs and so on. LÖVE itself is rock solid, but programs built on it may not be. So I try to minimize the number of layers of libraries I add atop it. So far that has meant I found it easier to just draw my own UI in all my program…
Flutter is a super compelling framework ( https://flutter.dev/multi-platform/desktop ), but I’d live in fear of it randomly being sent to the Google graveyard.
It had layoffs in 2024. And Google has emitted a bunch of words about their support for Flutter, but hasn't taken the most obvious step towards solidifying support: guarantee a minimal spend level on Flutter dev for a decade, either internally or by donating to an external foundation. eg we will spend $x on Flutter until 2036. :shrug: So they've carefully retained the option to cut support at will. Which is their cho…
[1]: https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/cross-platform-tuis-are-ea...
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It had layoffs in 2024. And Google has emitted a bunch of words about their support for Flutter, but hasn't taken the most obvious step towards solidifying support: guarantee a minimal spend level on Flutter dev for a decade, either internally or by donating to an external foundation. eg we will spend $x on Flutter until 2036. :shrug: So they've carefully retained the option to cut support at will. Which is their cho…
Everyone says this but personally it's been fine for me in 2025. It won't land you a job or funding because people are afraid of it. But if you're going to just build tools, it works.
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This is how I develop all the software that I don't work on professionally. I have a variety of small web servers with various capabilities that I use. The latest is Copy Party, which I learned about from HN a couple of weeks ago. My apps are then single files that know how to write modified copies of themselves back to the server. The server is dumb, it doesn't really know that it's anything other than just a file u…
Copyparty[0] is amazing. I've noticed copyparty+webdav is a lot faster for browsing my NAS than smb or nfs from macOS. I've been meaning to build a gallery application (or simple web page) that can browse pictures from a copyparty instance and sort/organise them with an UI fit for my purpose. Any pointers how I could make one that self-saves to copyparty? [0] https://github.com/9001/copyparty/
The general strategy is to figure out what state needs to be stored in your app, and combine that into one div in the page that can be grabbed via something like innerHTML. For a gallery app that is viewing pictures on copyparty, that will be the metadata, like the URL of the image, the tags you want to apply and/or what category it is in, the index within the album, the date info, etc.
Then, when your page loads, you can load all that and reason about how to arrange your photos, what to display, etc. Once that's done, the URLs can be swapped in to generate the appropriate view. I would give some thought to how to leverage WebDAV to create a directory that can store e.g. thumbnails. Copyparty does that itself, but your app should likely have its own disk-based cache accessible from a folder served by Copyparty.
The self-save part is mostly creating a something like a clone function that knows how to clone the static parts and inject updated sections for the data. I've written a little about about how to do this in my post years ago about a TiddlyWiki saver written for jart's Cosmopolitan.
https://rpdillon.net/redbean-tiddlywiki-saver.html
I've iterated on it quite a bit since then, and haven't updated my site accordingly. It's probably worth documenting the progress I've made since.