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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?

#111

Post by justinclift »

antoineMoPa wrote: post #37

GTK may have a difficult API, but it is portable and it gives a better feel than Qt for Linux+Gnome users like me (I will always choose a GTK app over a Qt app).

GTK's documentation is atrocious for anything in depth, and has been for years.

Saying that from wrongly choosing it over Qt for a cross platform screenrecording/annotation project a few years ago.

There's literally no way in hell to recommend GTK for any new desktop project that likely has a Windows audience. GTK is a mess. :(

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

#112

Post by tluyben2 »

kev6168 wrote: post #46

There is Livecode (livecode.org). Does anyone have experience using it in production? It's cross-platform and has both commercial and open source (community) versions.

I like it for prototyping. I have done some real client projects with it and it does work well and fast. Especially for apps that either require a custom UI or not too polished at all.

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

#113

Post by StreamBright »

Cyph0n wrote: post #72
StreamBright wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any source to this?

Even if it were true, you can easily bundle a JRE with your app, which is what Oracle recommends actually. In the end, it still ends up being smaller in size than a Electron/NW.js app.

I think it is not true at all. And yes you are probably better off with bundling.

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

#114

Post by fsloth »

orbitur wrote: post #96
fsloth wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> 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. That latter sentence kinda defeats the argument in your first sentence. If there's a dearth of options, then there's room for a better API.

"If there's a dearth of options, then there's room for a better API."

A new UI framework is not something you can wish for Christmas. One can implement one (like Blender has done) but other than that, one is limited to the options which are available.

I don't think anyone claims there is no space for new UI libraries. It's not obvious one can simply implement a new one. This is not something someone does for fun over a weekend (at industrial scale) or just to try an epiphany of design over a few months. They are huge, laborious beasts. If one has resources to implement a huge UI framework, then generally, they probably have the resources to implement the UI natively on every platform they wish to deploy on.

"A better API" is kinda moot feature for a UI library since they are technically so demanding, all other factors are more critical.

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

#115

Post by dom0 »

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…

> Qt only emulates Windows controls, but wxWidgets uses the actual Windows controls via Microsoft Win32 API.

This is not correct. Many controls use the native implementation of the underlying platform.

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

#116

Post by iamcreasy »

totocino wrote: post #35
_ZeD_ wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obsolete. Nowadays qt libs are distributed on choice between commercial and lgpl

Don't you have to release the source code of your application if you don't want to pay?

Not if you dynamically bind with qt libs. But yes you have to, if you statically bind with qt libs.

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

#117

Post by watmough »

api wrote: post #67
ryandrake wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, so sad, it just makes me think of all the code that could be cross-platform but for CString (MFC) and the like scattered through it.

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

#118

Post by pipio21 »

It depends on what you need.

In the past we used GTK and wxwidgets with OpenGL but we did not like it.

We started using Qt, much better(proper object oriented by design, and cleaner design than wxwidgets) and web apps. Now we use native libs with our own multiplattform lib with bindings for each plattform:

-javascript for the web.

-native cocoa and windows libs, with openGL, metal and directX.

-Qt for linux with OpenGL.

- Native mac(iOS and cocoa) and windows.

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

#119

Post by exDM69 »

EGreg wrote: post #105
EGreg wrote: post #68

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,…

Just out of curiosity, why did you downvote this? You don't think the Web is a good platform for UI or you don't like that I linked to our library built on top of it that we open sourced for UI?

Didn't downvote but... At the very least, a suggestion for a cross platform library for "sticking webviews to your app" would be needed to answer OP's question.
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