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Sciter – Multiplatform HTML/CSS UI Engine for Desktop and Mobile Applications

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Re: Sciter – Multiplatform HTML/CSS UI Engine for Desktop and Mobile Applications

#31

Post by notRobot »

stareatgoats wrote: post #16

This has been posted a few times to HN [0] and I've looked into it superficially without actually trying it out. For the benefit of anyone interested, these are my tentative conclusions. Please correct me if I've misunderstood anything. Sciter is a small company (single person ?) project, but the list of enterprise clients is an assurance. Their flavor of Javascript (TIscript) diverged from ECMAScipt more than 10 yea…

Relevant article by Sciter's author: "Making Sciter Open Source" https://terrainformatica.com/2019/09/13/making-sciter-open-s...

Re: Sciter – Multiplatform HTML/CSS UI Engine for Desktop and Mobile Applications

#32

Post by qwerty456127 »

> Various GUI frameworks offer different UI declaration and styling languages, such as QML and XAML (Microsoft WPF). On the contrary, Sciter allows using time proven, robust, and flexible HTML

What a remarkable piece of bullshit. QML and XAML have been designed from scratch right for UI mark-up, HTML is a legacy document mark-up language we are doomed to carry on together with gargantuan rendering engines and the whole pandemonium of frameworks while making UIs.

Re: Sciter – Multiplatform HTML/CSS UI Engine for Desktop and Mobile Applications

#33

Post by fingerlocks »

realharo wrote: post #27
fingerlocks wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly every native UI framework I’ve touched allows for a rich customized look of UI components. Often this means subclassing an abstract view thing that opens a toolbox of fine grained drawing commands. Your examples of boring native UI is the result of developers that don’t bother to exploit these features for whatever reasons- probably because it can be extremely time consuming to build native custom UI and adds…

I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying it would take a lot more effort (by a huge amount, plus more in prototyping phase of development when you're trying stuff out), and in the process you will likely lose many of the advantages of native UI that were mentioned (consistent behavior etc.). Take for example that "Jump to" text box - if your native UI toolkit doesn't let you add icons into the placeholder text lik…

Huh, so is the “jump to” text box easy to do on the web? I’m not very familiar with html/css, so genuinely curious.

And I don’t think it’s quite as hard as you describe natively, at least on AppKit/UIKit, windows, and android.

Re: Sciter – Multiplatform HTML/CSS UI Engine for Desktop and Mobile Applications

#34

Post by badsectoracula »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #24
realharo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar discussion on reddit a long time ago, and posted this screenshot of various Linux music players compared to Spotify. https://i.imgur.com/K44tJ2Y.png Lots of native UIs (especially from the past) tend to all have the same "grey boxes" look. I don't see how that's universally better. Another example was this part of Slack UI https://i.imgur.com/O71fdP5.png - how would you even do something like that wit…

At least on those "grey boxes" buttons look like other buttons, there is good contrast, they blend in with the other things in the UI and don't stick out like a sore thumb. One can preach about "brand identity" the whole day, but as a user, I couldn't care less about your brand. Integrate or die!

> Integrate or die!

While i otherwise agree with you, the "die" part requires users to value such integration and they do not seem to be doing that enough.

Re: Sciter – Multiplatform HTML/CSS UI Engine for Desktop and Mobile Applications

#36

Post by fabian2k »

stareatgoats wrote: post #16

This has been posted a few times to HN [0] and I've looked into it superficially without actually trying it out. For the benefit of anyone interested, these are my tentative conclusions. Please correct me if I've misunderstood anything. Sciter is a small company (single person ?) project, but the list of enterprise clients is an assurance. Their flavor of Javascript (TIscript) diverged from ECMAScipt more than 10 yea…

Using a Javscript dialect is a huge disadvantage in my opinion. I have worked with a similar dialect, and even if the language is pretty close to Javascript, a huge issue is that it breaks all tools and editors you would usually use. You have to rely entirely on the developers of that dialect to supply the tools you need.

And this situation only gets worse over time, as you're decoupled from the improvements of the language. Especially once there are a bunch of changes in the dialect that conflict with later developments of the parent language. My experience is also that there is inevitably more friction than you might expect when integrating libraries from the parent language.

For me this would be an immediate dealbreaker, it's just not worth it to tie yourself to a small dialect like this.

Re: Sciter – Multiplatform HTML/CSS UI Engine for Desktop and Mobile Applications

#37

Post by The_Colonel »

jcelerier wrote: post #29
realharo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar discussion on reddit a long time ago, and posted this screenshot of various Linux music players compared to Spotify. https://i.imgur.com/K44tJ2Y.png Lots of native UIs (especially from the past) tend to all have the same "grey boxes" look. I don't see how that's universally better. Another example was this part of Slack UI https://i.imgur.com/O71fdP5.png - how would you even do something like that wit…

> Lots of native UIs (especially from the past) tend to all have the same "grey boxes" look. it's not "grey box", it's "uses the native theme of the user's desktop". e.g. I use strawberry music player, if I am on a computer with a dark theme it's dark. Qt definitely allows slack-like look though if the developer opts-in to it - e.g. Telegram Desktop ( https://cdn2.nextinpact.com/images/bd/news/163843.jpeg ) is made w…

Interesting, I just assumed Telegram Desktop is electron app since it behaves similarly to one.

In the end I don't care how it's done as long as it works fine (which it does).

Re: Sciter – Multiplatform HTML/CSS UI Engine for Desktop and Mobile Applications

#38

Post by kienkien »

The_Colonel wrote: post #37
jcelerier wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lots of native UIs (especially from the past) tend to all have the same "grey boxes" look. it's not "grey box", it's "uses the native theme of the user's desktop". e.g. I use strawberry music player, if I am on a computer with a dark theme it's dark. Qt definitely allows slack-like look though if the developer opts-in to it - e.g. Telegram Desktop ( https://cdn2.nextinpact.com/images/bd/news/163843.jpeg ) is made w…

Interesting, I just assumed Telegram Desktop is electron app since it behaves similarly to one. In the end I don't care how it's done as long as it works fine (which it does).

"behaves similarly" How?

Re: Sciter – Multiplatform HTML/CSS UI Engine for Desktop and Mobile Applications

#39

Post by The_Colonel »

kienkien wrote: post #38
The_Colonel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I just assumed Telegram Desktop is electron app since it behaves similarly to one. In the end I don't care how it's done as long as it works fine (which it does).

"behaves similarly" How?

Besides Telegram, I have also electron based Rocket Chat and Slack (different teams, different apps :/) and all these apps look and feel very similar.

Telegram uses this non-native visual language which is very common in electron apps.

Re: Sciter – Multiplatform HTML/CSS UI Engine for Desktop and Mobile Applications

#40

Post by tenaciousDaniel »

I wonder why we see so many of these attempts at bringing html/css to native, while we (or at least I) see so few examples of the inverse.

I loved creating iOS apps with autolayout. Some parts of it were a bit frustrating, sure, but you could do things that were pretty hard with css. Why don't we see any lib for "make an app just as if you were making it for native, but now it runs on the web!"

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