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Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

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Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#71

Post by gkya »

johnfn wrote: post #63
gkya wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd audaciously guess that it's the songs you play in it that makes the spotify app popular, not the pack of ones and zeroes that the developers thereof like better.

Ever hear of the Napster audio app? Not the p2p thing, the paid subscription app? It was just like Spotify, way before Spotify? Oh really, no, you hadn't? Could it be because the UI was terrible? Hm. What about rdio? Back in the day, I remember noticing they had a much better music archive than Spotify in some areas like prog. Still, I never made the switch. (The way they organized music was terrible.) Apparently, ne…

So not electron = trash UX?

(edit: I'm an amateur musician, I do know quite a bit about the online music sphere, and I've been a paid user of both Deezer and Spotify in the past. You usually don't know who you're talking to on the internet, so better don't assume things.)

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#72

Post by vram22 »

walterbell wrote: post #35
9214 wrote: post #20

Red language

Is OSX support ready?

Check out their site red-lang.org. If I'm not wrong, it features the latest posts from their blog. That should tell you if it is ready, if you monitor it. Also, there was a fairly long and interesting thread about Red some days ago here, just like the recent interesting one about the D compiler being open sourced. It's been fun and educational to read the recent spate of programming language-related blog posts, for me. Hope it continues.

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#73

Post by detaro »

mamcx wrote: post #70
ThePhysicist wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded: - QT is a great and very-well designed library with solid performance, a fast release cycle and superb documentation. - It provides a rich and well thought-out component library. - It is used by many companies to build real-world applications. - It has a pretty liberal licensing scheme. The commercial license (if you need it) is not that expensive. - It provides bindings for many scripting languages like Py…

- The commercial license (if you need it) is not that expensive. I consider it very expensive. More than +US 3000/year for 1 developer? The open-source is useless for desktop apps?.

Why is the open-source version useless for desktop apps?

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#74

Post by dilap »

irishcoffee wrote: post #9

Obligatory: Qt. I've been tasked as a Qt dev at my day job for the past ~2.5 years writing cross-platform applications. It works, the documentation is pretty fantastic, and you'll find no shortage of help online to get over the admittedly decent learning curve if this is your first swing at "c++" programming. Edit: As mentioned below, PyQt is also pretty fantastic. My most recent venture into the PyQt world at work w…

Is there any Qt app for the Mac that doesn't land in the uncanny valley of UI? I've not been impressed with the apps I've tried.

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#77

Post by dopamean »

lj3 wrote: post #60
dopamean wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking just for myself here... I use Spotify every day and I can guarantee that I would switch if the software experience was bad. I honestly can't think of a time the app crashed. It can switch between my mobile devices and the desktop seamlessly almost every time. The overall design is intuitive enough _and_ it happens to come in a color scheme that I love. I used to find my music elsewhere and could do it again…

Switch to what? Everything else costs quite a bit of money (buying songs individually). Or you could pirate your music. Either way, it takes a shit ton of time to build up a halfway decent music library from scratch. Especially when the convenience of 'just search on spotify and add the entire artist to a playlist' is right there for free. I've had the spotify app crash my computer a few times. And then there was tha…

I'd switch to Apple Music or Google Music. Both are services I've tried that work for me.

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#78

Post by nkkollaw »

jonathonf wrote: post #25
nkkollaw wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why FreePascal..? This is suicide.

Something a little less hyperbolic might be better, e.g. what specifically is wrong with FreePascal?

The fact that the project is not popular because of the language it's written with..?

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#79

Post by nkkollaw »

dopamean wrote: post #48
nkkollaw wrote: post #12

Who cares if Electron is unpopular (is it?)? I use Electron apps daily: Atom, Spotify, and Wmail, and I'm perfectly productive with them. Atom is definitely slower than Sublime Text, but I'm not sure it's Electron's fault (I read that it isn't). As for Spotify and Wmail, you can't even tell it's Electron, and certainly no average user cares or would ever know. I would do what makes sense for your app and makes it eas…

Electron certainly isn't unpopular with the people who use applications built with Electron.

I doubt more than 95% of those who have Spotify install know what Electron is.

Re: Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

#80

Post by lousken »

seanwilson wrote: post #6

I would take opinions on here from developers with a big grain of salt. I read people saying things like Spotify and Atom are "unusable" and slow because they're written in JavaScript when they have plenty of happy users. A few 100MB of RAM or disk space extra is a nonexistent issue as well to typical users. I know some developers get very offended at a program using a bit more RAM or CPU than it should be but develo…

But atom is actually unusable, I've tried it, the lag is terrible, thank god for notepad++
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