101–110 of 293 posts
Chromes rendering engine is objectively better than Qt's for an awful lot of things.
What you may win back is a gig of ram that wasn't really being used anyways...
I'm really curious why anyone would want to do this. You'll almost surely arrive at something equally slow and awkward as Electron, but without the cutting edge interpreter, accessibility, or text support... Chromes rendering engine is objectively better than Qt's for an awful lot of things. What you may win back is a gig of ram that wasn't really being used anyways...
[1]: https://fman.io/blog/picking-technologies-for-a-desktop-app-...
I haven't used it personally but they appear to have a few notable clients. Seems they also have popular language bindings[1] (Go, Python, Rust etc...).
It's not opensource though so that could be a deal-breaker for some but licensing/pricing[2] isn't prohibitive.
Has anybody here on HN used this before? Care to share your experience with it?
[0] https://sciter.com/
[1] https://sciter.com/developers/sciter-sdk-bindings/
[2] https://sciter.com/prices/Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would disagree with this as I've created many small apps using QT, and getting started is much easier than with Electron (in my opinion). It is as easy as this: import sys from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QApplication, QWidget if __name__ == '__main__': app = QApplication(sys.argv) w = QWidget() w.setWindowTitle('Hello, world!') w.show() Also, styling apps in QT is really easy, in fact you can even use CSS: http://doc.q…
what do i need installed to get started with this, i have your code but what do i do next?
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As a developer, Electron's page shows their prowess in writing good front end code, which is really important. As someone who understands the basic concept of Electron, I want a product that demonstrates those competencies.
I get what you're saying, but "writes good web front end code" isn't on my list when I'm looking for a good Desktop development framework. I think stuff like this is pretty tribal, which is OK, but we should confuse it with decisions made on technical or experience merits.
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How is this an issue? Before Electron and other HTML/CSS-based "native" apps became all the rage (which is fairly recently), native apps were built using Qt, GTK, Cocoa, WPF, WinForms, MFC, etc., and they did just fine. Perhaps we just really don't need these "effects" and just need consistent, simple UIs of the sort that toolkits that paint native widgets can give you. Whenever I install an app that's built using so…
Linux and Mac weren’t as popular OSes either. And frankly, Windows apps didn’t need to look decent because people on the Windows/Linux side of the world were ok with really bad looking apps. Now that Desktop apps compete with web apps those toolkit’s are falling short. They are falling short in ease of development, cross compatibility, lack of trained developers (relative to web), and lack of good looking UIs and UI…
I have developed some larger Qt applications and in each case there are at most a couple dozen of lines with platform-specific code. Qt abstracts away most of the platform differences.
For me ‘good looking UIs and UI patterns’ means: well integrated in the platform and accessible. Electron apps fail miserably in both departments.
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What do you mean? I've uninstalled the Slack desktop app and just use the website because the app is such a terrible experience.
Wow. You realize they share most of the same code, and are essentially feature identical? Seriously, open the desktop app, then open the web app. They're identical. Precisely because they chose to use a toolkit that let them easily handle cross platform issues with UI in a sane and repeatable manner.
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How is this an issue? Before Electron and other HTML/CSS-based "native" apps became all the rage (which is fairly recently), native apps were built using Qt, GTK, Cocoa, WPF, WinForms, MFC, etc., and they did just fine. Perhaps we just really don't need these "effects" and just need consistent, simple UIs of the sort that toolkits that paint native widgets can give you. Whenever I install an app that's built using so…
"Bah humbug, the old stuff is good enough for me!" is a shitty answer. Why would you not want a toolkit that makes rich application experiences across multiple platforms easy and standard? I get that performance is a problem with the tooling in its current form (arguably...) but that's not a reason to ignore the problem electron is solving: creating complex UIs using things like WinForms, QT, GTK, Cocoa, etc SUCKS. I…
I get that Electron brings benefits: it's dirt-easy to build something that'll run on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, without having to know a bunch of platform-specific details, and if you already have a webapp, you can leverage a lot of that work, but in the end it just feels to me like people cutting corners. You get a sub-standard app, but you don't have to pay developers to build for each platform plus the web. Which I think is a perfectly reasonable business trade off to make; I'm just not happy with the result as a user.
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and another option use Tcl/Tk, or just Tk with your language of choice: http://www.tkdocs.com
How is the themeability of Tk? Can I make it look good? What's the best looking Tk app you're aware of?
I don't have an answer to your questions, but it's at least somewhere to start looking.
E: Most of the links are broken. This one is a bit better, but it's Windows-specific: https://wiki.tcl.tk/8646
I'm currently trying to formulate some thoughts on this; While I understand that HTML/CSS generally seems more flexible and may be more easily accessible to more/newer devs, it carries huge, negative implications in the forms of HCI (not having consistent interface elements on the user platform), performance and energy usage (particularly Electron), OS-integration, and accessibility features.
Can someone please give me some arguments as to why this not only seems like a good idea, but also why it's the best tool for the job?