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Ask HN: What's the best library for making cross-platform UIs?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best library for making cross-platform UIs?

#61

Post by jbergens »

fitzwatermellow wrote: post #27

Just getting started on Electron myself. Used by Atom, Slack, Visual Studio... It's worth a look ;) Electron - Build Cross-Platform Desktop Apps With HTML, JS, CSS http://electron.atom.io/

Electron only works for desktop applications and probably needs a js-framework to work good. I think that React + Electron looks like a nice combo and then you can use React Native to create Android and iPhone apps also, probably sharing a lot of code between all versions.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best library for making cross-platform UIs?

#62

Post by fsloth »

Svenstaro wrote: post #56
babuskov wrote: post #38

Strange nobody mentioned wxWidgets so far which gives you true native apps, so I'll do it: http://wxwidgets.org It provides API layer which compiles to Win32 API on Windows, Gtk2 on Linux and Carbon/Cocoa on Mac OSX. Qt only emulates Windows controls, but wxWidgets uses the actual Windows controls via Microsoft Win32 API. BTW, there's wxQt, a wxWidgets implementation that uses Qt instead of Gtk, but it's still experi…

In my experience with it, wxwidgets has a very antiquated feeling to the API (I know, subjective) and it didn't ship high DPI support when I used it. Its Python bindings at the time felt rather unpythonic. Generally I wouldn't want to use this again.

"wxwidgets has a very antiquated feeling to the API"

This should not be relevant in any professional technical discussion. Last time I looked there was not an overflowing oversupply of cross platform UI frameworks.

"it didn't ship high DPI support "

This, on the otherhand, might be a critical deficit.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best library for making cross-platform UIs?

#63

Post by jbergens »

You might have to define which platforms you want or need to target. There is a difference between just writing a desktop application that should work on Windows and Mac, an app that should work on iPhone and Android and a solution that needs to work on all of the above plus Linux desktops and Windows Phones and web browsers. [edit: spelling]

Re: Ask HN: What's the best library for making cross-platform UIs?

#65

Post by rch »

scrollaway wrote: post #6

Qt has a truly pleasant API and bindings in many languages. If you haven't used it before - and I know you haven't, otherwise you wouldn't be asking :) - give it a try. There's very little that's more cross-platform.

I've seen a significant uptick in Qt projects in the last 2-3 years.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best library for making cross-platform UIs?

#66

Post by edko »

"The best" is subjective. I have played around with libui (https://github.com/andlabs/libui), which runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS. A nice thing about it is that it is written in C, and therefore has bindings with several programming languages. I have experimented using it from Java (via JNA) and it works quite nicely.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best library for making cross-platform UIs?

#67

Post by api »

ryandrake wrote: post #41
scrollaway wrote: post #6

Qt has a truly pleasant API and bindings in many languages. If you haven't used it before - and I know you haven't, otherwise you wouldn't be asking :) - give it a try. There's very little that's more cross-platform.

Qt's nice, but the thing I've always disliked about it is that it re-implements all these basic types, like QString, QVector, QList, QMap, etc. and you need to use them to interact with all their APIs. So, you either have to decide you're all-in on Qt and have these QThis and QThat types littered all over your code (making it more difficult to interact with other third party libraries like boost that know nothing abo…

This is common in older C++ projects that predate good quality STL and good compilers everywhere. They should factor it out, but that would break a ton of code.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best library for making cross-platform UIs?

#68

Post by EGreg »

I'm just going to come out and say The Web. Stick WebViews in your app and if you need some native API use a bridge (like PhoneGap).

By itself you can already have tons and tons of great UI components that work cross platform.

But if you want a web based library specifically designed to present a common interface tailored to each device (desktop, tablet and mobile) and taking advantage of its unique characteristics, use our open source one:

http://qbix.com/platform

Re: Ask HN: What's the best library for making cross-platform UIs?

#69

Post by api »

tariqrauf wrote: post #3

Depends on what you're after :) Electron or QT for cross-desktop apps, Angular & Ion framework for cross-mobile apps, React & React-native for cross-mobile apps

There are efforts to bring React Native to desktop but I don't think they are production ready yet.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best library for making cross-platform UIs?

#70

Post by [deleted] »

fsloth wrote: post #62
Svenstaro wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience with it, wxwidgets has a very antiquated feeling to the API (I know, subjective) and it didn't ship high DPI support when I used it. Its Python bindings at the time felt rather unpythonic. Generally I wouldn't want to use this again.

"wxwidgets has a very antiquated feeling to the API" This should not be relevant in any professional technical discussion. Last time I looked there was not an overflowing oversupply of cross platform UI frameworks. "it didn't ship high DPI support " This, on the otherhand, might be a critical deficit.

[deleted]
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