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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?

#91

Post by vram22 »

open-source-ux wrote: post #7

Lazarus is a cross-platform IDE for native desktop applications on Windows, Mac and Linux. It produces fast, low-memory, single executable files for easy installation and deployment. Your app can use native OS controls - you won't be gluing together different libraries from different languages like you do with some scripting languages (with all the bloated size and performance issues that entails). Why isn't it more…

Good points.

I did this a few months ago:

Digital Clock created in FreePascal / Lazarus:

https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2017/04/digital-clock-created-in-...

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

#92

Post by johnfn »

gkya wrote: post #71
johnfn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Did I make assumptions? My bad. Well, I guess I made the assumption that you were unfamiliar with the napster app, so my bad. Other that that I dunno. (I happen to be an amateur musician as well. Fun coincidence.)

Anyways, what I'm saying is that using electron is not really correlated to "bad app" and not using electron is not correlated to "good app".

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

#93

Post by geokon »

blub wrote: post #66
geokon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I program in C++ professionally and about every 6 months I get the Qt tingle and think "I should really get around to learning Qt". But whenever I start to look into it I start to feel like I'm supposed to learning some custom language and it's not C++ at all - and how am I going to work this into the rest of my workflow I've got a pretty vanilla workflow with CMake, the GNU tools, the STL and emacs/KDevelop/CLI to t…

I don't know any such frameworks. Building a quality one takes a lot of work and time, I guess most of them are decades old at this point. I've included some answers below: * One can use Qt with CMake and for a large project probably should, because qmake can be quite limited. * Qt Creator is not a must, but it's a good C++ IDE and was designed to work well with Qt. I think KDevelop should have pretty good Qt support…

thanks! I guess you're right, it doesn't seem so bad. I might dig into this more next time I have a project that needs a UI.

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

#94

Post by nkkollaw »

jonathonf wrote: post #86
nkkollaw wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why is FreePascal unpopular (or what makes you say that)? Is it lack of mindshare, lack of "hotness", some specific deficiency, or... ?

I just read what the comment said:

> Why isn't it more popular? Because it's written in FreePascal: a modern, object-oriented version of Pascal. A lot of readers will stop right here and never this give project another glance, the thought of using Pascal as simply too outdated or embarrassing.

Personally, I've never heard of the framework and FreePascal would definitely be a reason not to adopt it for me, as I'm not familiar with how to fix problems should they arise, while I would be able to troubleshoot an app written on Java or better yet NodeJS.

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

#95

Post by roryisok »

I mentioned this yesterday on another thread but it seems relevant here. I really wish MS would make something like this for .net core. I love c#, it's performant and easy to code in. Would love to have some sort of cross platform UI to go with it.

Here's hoping some Microsoft people are reading this

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

#96

Post by laumars »

sktrdie wrote: post #58

Why not just have a daemon process that runs a site on HTTP or WebSocket so you can use the app in your browser? I've seen apps that run with a double-click, stay open, and open my browser tab on 127.0.0.1:43110, with the entire app right there. It takes very little to develop, and it's lightweight because it's already using a runtime we all use most of the time (a web browser). For the development side, this is pret…

I've often said that if I wanted to run a desktop application in a web browser, then I would prefer to run it in an actual web browser and thus share the framework footprint rather than running multiple instances of Electron.

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

#98

Post by laumars »

johnfn wrote: post #27

Electron hasn't stopped Spotify from making the most widely used music client and VSCode from making the third most popular IDE.

IIRC when Spotify switched to Electron there was a massive outcry from the general computing masses saying how much worse the new Spotify client was. You also have to bare in mind that Spotify is winning in it's market due to licencing (providing a range of music that other competitors haven't been able to licence). It's got naff all to do with the quality of the client.

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

#99

Post by sealord »

fknop wrote: post #26
sealord wrote: post #5

Have you checked out [NW.js]( https://nwjs.io/ )? I'm not sure if it's better than Electron in terms of executable size and performance, but definitely worth a shot. Then there's [Kivy]( https://kivy.org/#home ). Love that.

One of the main guy behind nwjs was actually hired by Github to create Electron.

Then I'm not sure to what extent nw.js solves the problem.

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

#100

Post by 9214 »

jonathonf wrote: post #88
9214 wrote: post #20

Red language

Still missing the whole cross-platform GUI thing though. $ ./red Compiling compression library... Compiling Red console... --== Red 0.6.2 ==-- Type HELP for starting information. >> view [text "Hello World"] *** Script Error: view has no value *** Where: catch

Indeed, OSX is almost ready for launch (0.6.3 release), while Linux branch is stalled because of main contributor disappearance. Still looks very promising ;)
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