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Ask HN: What is the best way to build a desktop app in Windows in 2023?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to build a desktop app in Windows in 2023?

#91
post #82
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If MFC are an option, then wxWidgets is also an option.

Sure, but MFC is from Microsoft. wxWidgets is not and things may have changed but my experience with most cross-platform libraries back in the day was that they could get close but never get real native UI experience.

wxWidgets is as native as MFC. It is the same real controls, Win32 style.

It is the only cross-platform library that uses native Windows controls. Qt? Emulated. GTK? Only native in Gnome, emulated on Windows.

Even the new APIs, like WinUI, from Microsoft, are less native than wxWidgets.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to build a desktop app in Windows in 2023?

#92
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's value in using a popular language with staying power. That's a good point about popular languages, but you can't complain about Dephi's staying power. Wikipedia shows it as having been released in 1995, and it still seems to be going!

>but you can't complain about Dephi's staying power. Wikipedia shows it as having been released in 1995, and it still seems to be going! Yes, but it's only really alive due to legacy systems. You don't often see new development done on it, at least in the US. Good luck finding a Delphi developer vs. Java or C#. I think it's still popular in Eastern Europe though. I do love the platform and I used it for probably 13 y…

I hear now and then that Delphi is still popular in Germany.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to build a desktop app in Windows in 2023?

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams is, and it's IMO the worst Office app available. I don't have time to get into all the reasons why right now because I need to sleep and it always leads to a 30 minute irl rant or a multiparagraph screed about the complete breakdown of their corporate work culture and terrible UI tooling that they can't fix a context menu rendering bug in their own damn "native" first-party corporate communications app when _Th…

Teams is react.js

Isn't it AngularJS 1.0?

Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to build a desktop app in Windows in 2023?

#95

If you're feeling adventurous, I'd try Pharo [0]. I was at the ESUG conference (the European Smalltalk conference) and it seems that when you combine: * Bloc (UI framework) * The stuff in their new presentation (will be online in a few months) * Pharo You could get pretty far. For example, this game [1] has been packaged as a Win/Mac app [2]. [0] https://pharo.org [1] https://github.com/Enzo-Demeulenaere/Takuzu [2] h…

I really REALLY want to use Pharo to build something significant -- I love the ideas behind Smalltalk -- but I've been disappointed every time I've tried.

My problem is that, in 2023, Pharo still doesn't support high DPI displays, which means it's a blurry mess on every single display currently in my house.

It's blurry on my M1 MacBook Pro, on my PC with Windows 11, and on the Lenovo X1 with Ubuntu I owned briefly during the pandemic. It's blurry on all the external monitors I own. If I could run it on my iPad, I bet it would be blurry on my iPad too.

Bumping up the font size in the IDE settins is a reasonable workaround for this issue, but it's not a good long-term solution. While it makes the text in the IDE readable, other UI elements are still either comically tiny or blurry, depending on your settings. Sometimes there are some UI elements that scale up with the font size, and others that don't, which results in an inconsistent UI that's hard to use.

MacBooks have had "retina" screens since 2012, and 4k displays are increasingly becoming more common. I hope Pharo will eventually support proper UI scaling, because I can't try out your cool futuristic IDE if I can't even see it properly!

Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to build a desktop app in Windows in 2023?

#96
post #8

Without more details, this is the way to get the most native Windows 11 look and feel: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/winui/winui3/ Disclosure: I work at Microsoft on a team that works on visual look and feel for Windows.

Thanks, what is best non-web way to get windows 95 look for a desktop app?

Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to build a desktop app in Windows in 2023?

#97

If you're feeling adventurous, I'd try Pharo [0]. I was at the ESUG conference (the European Smalltalk conference) and it seems that when you combine: * Bloc (UI framework) * The stuff in their new presentation (will be online in a few months) * Pharo You could get pretty far. For example, this game [1] has been packaged as a Win/Mac app [2]. [0] https://pharo.org [1] https://github.com/Enzo-Demeulenaere/Takuzu [2] h…

I really REALLY want to use Pharo to build something significant -- I love the ideas behind Smalltalk -- but I've been disappointed every time I've tried. My problem is that, in 2023, Pharo still doesn't support high DPI displays, which means it's a blurry mess on every single display currently in my house. It's blurry on my M1 MacBook Pro, on my PC with Windows 11, and on the Lenovo X1 with Ubuntu I owned briefly du…

Hmm odd, I develop on an M1 Pro and I feel fine with how Pharo looks.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to build a desktop app in Windows in 2023?

#99
post #46

WPF with some external controls. - Still supported on latest .NET - Most feature rich and battle tested - Good documentation - You will learn XAML which can be later used once when WinUI 3.0 is more mature (at least another 5,6 years will be needed with their current development velocity) PS. XAML is a bit different but similiar enoguh between WPF and WinUI. Of course it depends on what type of application.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What is the best way to build a desktop app in Windows in 2023?

#100
People in this thread are looking at this like a "top-down" case of "when is Microsoft going to hand down the magical UI solution to everyone" when in reality, Microsoft is in the same boat as all of us which is that there is no clear direction to the future of non-web UI.

That leaves the opportunity of the future to the community. And I think we want to convey the message that 1. We have web UI options, so don't reinvent that wheel. 2. Windows is not web, so give us a UI that is desktop-centric. And in that vein, people use desktop for complex tasks, so don't try to force Windows into colorful Duplo-sized buttons and style (don't make Windows web: i'm looking at you WinUI, Xamarin,etc; all more recent Microsoft offerings ditch the complexity and move toward web design). We demand feature rich, deep, complex systems.

WPF is the most advanced UI designer ever created. WPF was made open-source (mostly) and then mothballed. It's way too complex to build from source and they are accepting nearly zero PRs from non-Microsoft sources. Maybe the move to send WPF management to the India team was a possible way to increase activity around WPF (since its repo has been drydocked and managed by like 3 people for years).

Avalonia is nice, but not nearly as capable.

I would love a potential future to be Microsoft dusting off WPF and getting serious about open-source. Fix some infrastructural problems like building from source that allow developers to begin exploring how to rebuild the rendering engine, preferably using something GPU-driven like OpenGL. There is a lot of excitement in the realm of using game engines to render UI, it would be great to have some team members be architects to design the retained-mode side of the UI interfacing with team members that are immediate mode designers, think OpenGL, Vulkan, etc. Having looked through the WPF source code, this is pretty much how it was, the WPF logic interfacing with Windows draw calls. It's just outdated.

WPF isn't fully open source, which is a huge problem. A lot of the low level graphics calls are still calling to non-open-source Windows libraries, so it's really opaque how to modularize the rendering calls. Microsoft needs to spend a year devoting a team to internally forking Win32 and then building interfaces for every WPF call into non-open-source rendering code. Then the community can actually fork some alternatives using modern graphics renderers.

I don't think we will ever see this though. Microsoft, despite languishing as a market-mover, has too much temerity to give the community this kind of control over it's core. They want WPF as an "outdated" technology to be reliant on Win32, instead of wanting it to be replaced with something more modern. They will happily keep releasing incomplete and remedial UI frameworks built atop antiquated DirectX forever.

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