141–150 of 186 posts
Can it handle printing too? That's a cross platform PITA too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My personal reason is that GTK 3+ lost his track in what constitutes a desktop widget set. It's also getting slower at each release, it keeps breaking visual consistency and basic features get removed or heavily deprecated in favor of a "dumbed down" approach. So if the non-technical users are actually migrating to dumb web-apps and couldn't care less, the technical crowd which demand power features and efficiency ar…
> It's also getting slower at each release, it keeps breaking visual consistency and basic features get removed or heavily deprecated in favor of a "dumbed down" approach. This is simply not true. We are closer to hitting 60 fps (or whatever your EDID actually presents) than ever before, and staying locked to that. The more complex of an interface you create, the harder that is, but that is no different today than ev…
I hope for the CSS theme changes there is some sort of migration, or warning - was trying gnome-staging on Ubuntu and lots of things broke with the change.
Fingers crossed that GL will bring GL Enabled cairo at the same time.
Why would anyone write a GUI app in C? Almost every alternative is better for the job.
This is a very good approach for the current times! As far as I understand from the source code, libui is a thin C wrapper that makes calls to each platform native ui framework. For instance, to create a window on OSX it calls the corresponding Cocoa function, for Linux the corresponding GTK function, etc. So, unlike Qt and GTK which are heavy cross-platform libraries because they can "draw" their own widgets themsel…
I was recently thinking that operating systems should ditch their custom desktops in favor of a browser based UI. Microsoft tried this idea out and it didn't work a few years back but it still seems to me that a browser based OS UI would be far more effective than things like Gnome and KDE and all that stuff. Edit: well I guess Google had the same idea long ago and called it ChromeOS - browser as OS interface.
> I was recently thinking that operating systems should ditch their custom desktops in favor of a browser based UI. Here's the really funny thing though, if you just think about it for a second: Whether browsers become as powerful as operating systems, or operating systems become as convenient (for users and developers) as browsers, The end result will be exactly the same. Yep. Consider how we use browsers vs. native…
> It will take far less work to make the discoverability and acquisition of native apps as convenient as typing in a web address.
I don't see that as the case at all. The UI libraries are just the tip of the iceberg.
In fact, I think CSS is better suited to hardware acceleration with modern GPUs than these native libraries, which date back to the '90s, are. That's because they're declarative instead of based on imperative systems like GDI that were designed for rendering on old CPUs.
These APIs are notoriously hard to get right and coherent, and releasing at such an early stage will make it hard to change anything when building up on this. That said I do not know of any cross platform library in C, so this does seem to fill a niche.
Finally. I'm hoping that a native UI toolkit that can be used via FFI from nearly any language might take a chunk out of the Web-as-application-delivery-platform mindset. I don't blame anyone for making non-native apps with Electron and HTML5, because it's so difficult to make them work on every platform. But here's to hoping someone finally got it right, and that native applications can take back some ground. Death…
Why would anyone write a GUI app in C? Almost every alternative is better for the job.
Me, because I don't want any of: - huge binaries (or dependencies) - slow compiles - slow runtime - garbage collection - non-portability - C++ (I just don't like it) ...pretty much every popular language other than C falls into one or more of the above. Yeah, I know I'm fussy.
Anyhow, I used to be the same way (perhaps surprisingly given what I work on now), but I stopped once I realized that it just takes so long to do basic things in C compared to other languages. The downside of slow compilation, for example, pales in comparison to the downside of it taking a lot more code to do basic things like string manipulation.
I'd also mention that, on Windows, C has big dependencies as well (msvcrt), unless you cheat like MinGW does and use the unsupported system msvcrt.
Nice work, but I wish SWT had picked up more steam outside the Java community. It's the same idea, but with a decade+ of banging on the corner cases for the use cases of the Eclipse IDE. In addition to all the standard controls, it's also got OpenGL and browser embedding since before Electron was cool. Using it on the JVM is very easy, but there was a short-lived attempt to maintain a C++ API. - How it looks: https:/…
Wouldn't you have to embedd JVM to use SWT? Reminds me of a quote by Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, on OO programming: "You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle."