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Tiny Apps

tinyapps.org

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Re: Tiny Apps

#71

Post by squarefoot »

badsectoracula wrote: post #54
microtonal wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad it's easier to write apps than ever before. But it was easy before. If you are willing to forego completely native UIs (which you are when you are using Electron), it's always been easy to make GUI apps with Qt. Drag together an UI in designer, use (py|whatever)uic to generate classes, hook up signals/slots, and you are done. I can only pin it on intellectual laziness of front-end programmers not wanting to…

I'd say that with Lazarus ( http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ ) it even easier - just drag/drop the controls to forms to build your GUI, double click on buttons/checkboxes/radiobuttons/whatever or click on menus or double click on the event editor to automatically write the event handling boilerplate code and you just write the actual code in-place. Creates native executables without need for runtimes or big DLLs (you can…

In my previous life as a cubicle drone in the late 90s I have worked with Delphi under Windows and always dreamed about it being ported/cloned/whatever on Linux. After seeing a demonstration of Kylix many years ago I almost lost any hope (slow as molasses and buggy), then one day I saw this new project called Lazarus which promised high compatibility with Delphi code and to allow building of native apps. Admittedly it was very buggy then, but eventually it matured over time and I'd say it has been damn ready to be used for production for some years. Give it a try and you won't be disappointed.

Re: Tiny Apps

#72

Post by yoodenvranx »

voltagex_ wrote: post #31
Lerc wrote: post #17

When I see the specs of things like the Raspberry Pi and Apps like this, it makes me wonder how great a system like that could be. Executable size may not be the best measure of these things though. Ram usage of some things can be quite huge. tinyapps.org seems to avoid this by disallowing things needing runtimes, which while not the cause of RAM bloat, often tends to be a common factor. I'd actually like to see an i…

I've been thinking about this a lot, mainly due to being grumpy about the proliferation of Electron apps and the effect that's having on my available RAM. When I'm not being so grumpy, I'm glad it's easier to write apps than ever before. I think someone on here posited that it's a choice between something written in Electron or not written at all. I think that's fair enough - maybe we just need to make it easier to w…

> I'm glad it's easier to write apps than ever before.

I believe that it is Delphi which sits right at the sweet spot of 'native code', 'easy gui development' and 'easy deploy' and I am sad that it is not really in use anymore.

Re: Tiny Apps

#74

Post by j_s »

j_s wrote: post #24

Although it was "removed due to copyright violations"[1] in 2003, TinyWindowsGames.com was a work of art. If you don't mind downloading random binaries you can still grab them via the Internet Archive. I will see if I can create a new screenshot of the playable, tiny thumbnail near the system tray (probably microscopic at today's resolutions). https://web.archive.org/web/20030618002602/http://www.tinywi... [1] Ninten…

Apparently some of the games are in the system tray.

http://imgur.com/a/CuA6e

Re: Tiny Apps

#75

Post by swiley »

I always love playing around with busybox, which is more or less the Linux equivalent to this. Small software is beautiful.

Re: Tiny Apps

#76

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

squarefoot wrote: post #71
badsectoracula wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that with Lazarus ( http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ ) it even easier - just drag/drop the controls to forms to build your GUI, double click on buttons/checkboxes/radiobuttons/whatever or click on menus or double click on the event editor to automatically write the event handling boilerplate code and you just write the actual code in-place. Creates native executables without need for runtimes or big DLLs (you can…

In my previous life as a cubicle drone in the late 90s I have worked with Delphi under Windows and always dreamed about it being ported/cloned/whatever on Linux. After seeing a demonstration of Kylix many years ago I almost lost any hope (slow as molasses and buggy), then one day I saw this new project called Lazarus which promised high compatibility with Delphi code and to allow building of native apps. Admittedly i…

I've tried to use Lazarus five or six times now, as a one-time Delphi developer: the main issue is that the lazarus ide likes to crash on the slightest provocation (and the 64bit mac versions don't work very well either)

Re: Tiny Apps

#77

Post by mherrmann »

I wish it were easy to write such small apps, particular cross-platform. I'm developing a cross-platform file manager [1]. It's way more bloated with dependencies than I would like. But I can't justify spending time on trimming its dep's when there is so much functionality that needs to be implemented. Having said that, I did choose PyQt over Electron​ for performance reasons [2].

[1]: https://fman.io

[2]: https://fman.io/blog/picking-technologies-for-a-desktop-app-...

Re: Tiny Apps

#78

Post by StavrosK »

badsectoracula wrote: post #54
microtonal wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad it's easier to write apps than ever before. But it was easy before. If you are willing to forego completely native UIs (which you are when you are using Electron), it's always been easy to make GUI apps with Qt. Drag together an UI in designer, use (py|whatever)uic to generate classes, hook up signals/slots, and you are done. I can only pin it on intellectual laziness of front-end programmers not wanting to…

I'd say that with Lazarus ( http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ ) it even easier - just drag/drop the controls to forms to build your GUI, double click on buttons/checkboxes/radiobuttons/whatever or click on menus or double click on the event editor to automatically write the event handling boilerplate code and you just write the actual code in-place. Creates native executables without need for runtimes or big DLLs (you can…

Don't you need to be using Lazarus' language (Delphi?) for that? In most cases, that's very prohibitive, since a language with a large ecosystem is usually what you'd want to be writing stuff in.

Re: Tiny Apps

#79

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #72
voltagex_ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about this a lot, mainly due to being grumpy about the proliferation of Electron apps and the effect that's having on my available RAM. When I'm not being so grumpy, I'm glad it's easier to write apps than ever before. I think someone on here posited that it's a choice between something written in Electron or not written at all. I think that's fair enough - maybe we just need to make it easier to w…

> I'm glad it's easier to write apps than ever before. I believe that it is Delphi which sits right at the sweet spot of 'native code', 'easy gui development' and 'easy deploy' and I am sad that it is not really in use anymore.

As others have mentioned there's Lazarus, an open source ide that duplicates the Delphi experience. Although, it still needs quite a bit of polish.

Re: Tiny Apps

#80

Post by EGreg »

miles wrote: post #23
j_s wrote: post #22

Paging HN user miles! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12985672 I'm afraid (or perhaps the word I'm looking for is "glad" ;-) that the Internet has passed tinyapps.org on by. After its fleeting 15 seconds of fame back in 2001 (thanks to a Slashdotting and tiny blurb in Wired), the site has mainly served as an irregular tech blog lo these many years.

Ha! Thanks so much for the kind shout-out, j_s - what a memory you have! Glad to see my humble corner of the web is still of some small interest ;-)

How did you know he mentioned you?

Is there some sort of @mention bookmarklet/browser extension in HN?

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