So it's Flutter, but with ReasonML/OCaml instead of Dart.
So electric car, but from Tesla instead of Nissan. ;)
Revery – Native, high-performance, cross-platform desktop apps
61–70 of 129 posts
Re: Revery – Native, high-performance, cross-platform desktop apps
#62Say what you will but electron being "terrible" has been a great thing for advancing the state of cross platform gui!
true. on macos many of the QT and java apps that used to be the norm were a lot worse. clipped buttons, for example.
or pseudo-aqua buttons that were not quite right, uncanny-valley style.
Re: Revery – Native, high-performance, cross-platform desktop apps
#63> Revery is the same - aside from platform-specific behavior, if your app looks or behaves differently on another platform, that's a bug! I want my applications to feel like they belong to the platform and not identical on every platform
> I want my applications to feel like they belong to the platform and not identical on every platform Yeah, Electron already does that. I can hardly say I am looking for more of it.
As a desktop Linux user who rarely got to have good GUI applications until electron became popular because it's barely economical for anyone to actually maintain 3 sep UIs, I am absolutely looking for more of it
And to be clear, what we're talking about is more options for folks that want to ship to all platforms and focus on perfecting one UI.
Is it better than doing a truly native app on each platform? Of course not, but that's outside the realm of possibility for the resources most developers have
Re: Revery – Native, high-performance, cross-platform desktop apps
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course that's a choice for everyone to make, but I feel like in general the benefit of fitting in the platform is overrated. After all the whole webapp-everything somewhat shows that people don't care that much, they are happy to use GMail for example. Another family of examples would be the big software packages like the Adobe or Autodesk stuff, they tend to have a fairly custom look&feel. IMO it's probably suffi…
> Of course that's a choice for everyone to make, but I feel like in general the benefit of fitting in the platform is overrated. I disagree; the benefit isn't overrated, it's underrated because it's not realized, thanks to most apps doing their best to _not_ fit in the platform. What full platform fit enables is consistent UX and interoperability . Lack of the latter places an actual cap of what users can do (except…
> "...it's underrated because it's not realized, thanks to most apps doing their best to _not_ fit in the platform..."
At first I did agree. But then my second thought was: this calls into question some very significant and very experienced brands. To think that many, that big, are doing it wrong naturally doesn't feel right.
Re: Revery – Native, high-performance, cross-platform desktop apps
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious what kind of features you're referring to.
Yeah to me, as someone who considers themselves a Mac power user (12 years of learning keyboard shortcuts and clever system tricks), Electron apps stand out immediately. There are so many small details, like proxy icons and commonly accepted shortcuts for particular actions. These are things you either get for free or nearly so when writing native apps using the system frameworks, or they are things that people tryin…
>and commonly accepted shortcuts
Leaving aside the visual aspects (which are important for at least some users), this is what actually matters the most. Breaking keyboard shortcuts or having weird replacements for them is a big no-no for Electon based apps.
Re: Revery – Native, high-performance, cross-platform desktop apps
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The number of times I've ever heard anyone complain that VSCode reimplements clickable regions that look exactly the same on all platforms instead of using some ugly stock Windows buttons: zero. The number of times I've been annoyed that Electron apps break some semi-obscure but nevertheless important macOS feature: quite high, and it would be much higher if I hadn't sworn off Electron apps long ago.
I'm curious what kind of features you're referring to.
Text input lacks expected shortcuts, multi-select, good undo/redo, spellcheck underline, grammar check, smart features, text replacement, transformation conveniences, etc.
All menus lack basic/expected items, both in the menu bar to contextual menus (if they exist).
No standard find and replace. Missing options for pattern matching, diacriticals, case sensitivity, weird UI, etc. if this is included at all.
Low-accessibility, not even basic text to speech support for visual impairments.
Drag and drop support being poor and lacking, both for capturing data and importing data. Despite electron apps being glorified webpages, even selecting content is inhibited in most places.
Odd spacing of controls that is either too much or too little. Everything looks off and stands out in a bad way, like no one cares.
Electron apps are a total UI and UX mess and are worst-class citizens on macOS. If your idea of cross-platform makes a dev add platform specific BASICS, devs will simply not add them, assuming they know or care about them at all.
When I see an Electron app I think “this is an ass app from an ass dev” and throw most of them in the trash.
Re: Revery – Native, high-performance, cross-platform desktop apps
#67> Revery is the same - aside from platform-specific behavior, if your app looks or behaves differently on another platform, that's a bug! I want my applications to feel like they belong to the platform and not identical on every platform
As an alternative for Electron it's not as important, so I cheer the effort. But... For me that means it's not really "native". Native as in CPU native is just to say it's reasonably fast and efficient. It's nice, but I'm looking for platform native. When your application is native in the first sense, you are competing with almost everyone. Games, even applications written with SDL are native in this sense. And almos…
> With accessibility you could cross out most of the toolkits I mentioned. That's how you stand out.
I'd like to see accessibility baked-in because that would be my preferred path to a fully-addressable/programmable UI, and UI-QA-as-code. The way we QA UI's today is way too hack'ish. I want to be able to write unit tests for the UI within the development flow of writing the UI itself, not in some external, bolted-on fashion. Part of what seems missing is I can call the UI to perform some action on my behalf, but querying the compositor upon the final results sitting on the display output seems to be haphazardly available; I can query for some elements, but not all, or I can query for pixels but not what UI element those pixels belong to.
Re: Revery – Native, high-performance, cross-platform desktop apps
#68Sorry but I won’t learn Reasonml in order to use this.
Re: Revery – Native, high-performance, cross-platform desktop apps
#69> Revery is the same - aside from platform-specific behavior, if your app looks or behaves differently on another platform, that's a bug! I want my applications to feel like they belong to the platform and not identical on every platform
I want my applications to feel like they belong to the platform and not identical on every platform
I'm the exact opposite. I could care less about the underlying platform... I want my apps to behave exactly the same everywhere.
Re: Revery – Native, high-performance, cross-platform desktop apps
#70> Revery is the same - aside from platform-specific behavior, if your app looks or behaves differently on another platform, that's a bug! I want my applications to feel like they belong to the platform and not identical on every platform
Of course that's a choice for everyone to make, but I feel like in general the benefit of fitting in the platform is overrated. After all the whole webapp-everything somewhat shows that people don't care that much, they are happy to use GMail for example. Another family of examples would be the big software packages like the Adobe or Autodesk stuff, they tend to have a fairly custom look&feel. IMO it's probably suffi…
Non-native GUIs are probably the number one reason we've fallen so far behind in control over our UIs that "dark mode" is legitimately considered a feature.
It is absolutely ridiculous that, in 1995, I could completely change the font sizes and color scheme of my UI radically and it would work with the vast majority of applications, but in 2019 I have to wait for a developer to decide to add a theme or provide some kind of customization facility unique to their software.