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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

#41

Post by sgerenser »

severak_cz wrote: post #26
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…

> I had a similar discussion on reddit a long time ago, and posted this screenshot of various Linux music players compared to Spotify. In 90s this was solved by using "skins" which were actually drawn in graphics programs and then spliced and edited in some proprietary editor and/or positioned by hand crafted config file. See https://winampheritage.com/skin for example. You can't go more original than these. :-D I do…

Skins like that don’t scale. Fine if you’re still using a 1366*768 laptop, but even 1080p let alone 4K makes everything tiny or blown up and blurry.

Doesn’t mean you need electron to fix it, it can be done with a native UI. But bitmapped skins are generally not used anymore for a reason.

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

#42

Post by mgoetzke »

cosmotic wrote: post #5

HTML/CSS based native interfaces are some of the hardest to use, least reliable, least accessible, least robust interfaces I encounter; The demo interfaces on their website all fit into the unusable pot. I admit most/all of the interfaces I've personal used are using electron/webkit/ie to render which are all quite bloated. Is this different? It's not entirely clear and would be an important differentiator. I still d…

The 'native' 'modern' apps on Windows 10 are not known for being small, fast, or especially well designed either though.

I developed a number of WFP apps (starting with the earliest versions) and it was very very far from being easy compared to html. Debuggability, Stability, Performance were all sub-par.

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

#43

Post by stbn »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #40

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!"

Google Web Toolkit [1] does this.

[1] http://www.gwtproject.org/

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

#44

Post by deergomoo »

realharo wrote: post #15
cosmotic wrote: post #5

HTML/CSS based native interfaces are some of the hardest to use, least reliable, least accessible, least robust interfaces I encounter; The demo interfaces on their website all fit into the unusable pot. I admit most/all of the interfaces I've personal used are using electron/webkit/ie to render which are all quite bloated. Is this different? It's not entirely clear and would be an important differentiator. I still d…

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…

A point I think is worth noting is that Linux software is far more likely to be FOSS, and FOSS is far less likely to have dedicated designers. LibreOffice wouldn't look out of place in 2002 for example, but it's not because of the platform/SDK it runs on. Whereas Spotify most definitely has a whole team of design staff.

That aside, if the rest of my OS has a "grey boxes" look, I would like my software to have a "grey boxes" look.

Sure, your design may be pretty, but if it looks and works completely differently to my other applications and the OS itself, I consider that a pretty huge point against it.

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

#45

Post by readarticle »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #40

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!"

There are probably 100 web devs for every iOS / Android dev.

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

#46

Post by c-smile »

cosmotic wrote: post #5

HTML/CSS based native interfaces are some of the hardest to use, least reliable, least accessible, least robust interfaces I encounter; The demo interfaces on their website all fit into the unusable pot. I admit most/all of the interfaces I've personal used are using electron/webkit/ie to render which are all quite bloated. Is this different? It's not entirely clear and would be an important differentiator. I still d…

Sciter's author here.

> HTML/CSS based native interfaces are some of the hardest to use, least reliable, least accessible, least robust interfaces I encounter

This has nothing with HTML/CSS per se but rather questions to particular products. Same complain may apply to any UI.

> The best native apps look and behave natively;

"Native app" term these days is something almost non existent.

In these terms Microsoft Office is not a native app as they use custom UI framework for UI. Pretty much whole Window 10 UI now is not "native" in this sense. UWP is a custom UI layer that uses windowless DirectX based UI. There are some low level utilities left in dusted corners of Windows that can be classified as "native" but there are just few of them - no one cares.

Consider my https://html-notepad.com as an example (purely sciter app and so HTML/CSS UI), this application simply cannot use "native UI". No OS has needed components out of the box.

Yet pretty much any modern app must have one way to another to render and to produce HTML - we want our applications to be connected (read: interact with the Web).

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

#47

Post by vijaybritto »

realharo wrote: post #25
vijaybritto wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not 100% sure but I think the slack design can be achieved in wxWidgets. Yes the native apps look bland but why would I use an app that requires 500M to play music?

Why not? If it works ok and doesn't eat battery/CPU too much when in background, then who cares? For exapmle I like that I can plug my phone into the speakers (yay headphone jack), and control the music from a laptop on the other side of the room. Also, it's more like 200 MB on my computer, most of which is predictably CEF. In comparison bundling Qt dlls would also add like 50MB if I remember correctly.

I'm talking about RAM not SSD. And no I don't have multiple computers in my house. A single laptop with 16G of RAM is all I have. I have to use it for work. We all know about music apps playing music while using less than 50M at any given time. If its in the background then even less. I know the dev experience is far greater in electron but its simply not performant. But if I were to launch a product on all platforms then I'll go for electron probably cause its the fastest to market

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

#48

Post by c-smile »

Sciter's author here.

Couple of words about "native UI" and on statements like: "I (a hard-core software developer) prefer gray boxes".

You (as a software developer), is one of 1% of UI users. But rest of us (99%, sic!) consume UI in form of Web sites, right?

So "Native UI" these days shall look closer to default Bootstrap theme then to something that OS provides. My wife (as an example) has Windows notebook, iPhone and Android based book reader - "native UI" for her is meaningless at best.

About desktop applications in general...

There are two major types of applications:

a) the ones used time to time / rarely; b) and productive applications used 24/7 - parts of job workflow.

The ones that used time to time (what I name as "one big red button applications") must have descriptive UI - e.g. hot-keys don't work there - no one is bothered to remember them. So the UI shall be self descriptive, pictographic, etc. 1 second looking on window to make decision what to use.

Such applications must follow modern UI trends - who will trust antivirus if it looks as dinosaur from prehistoric times? That's why AV vendors prefer to use CSS, just to minimize maintenance costs, see: https://sciter.com/from-skeuomorph-to-flat-ui-evolution-of-o...

Productive applications: MS Office, Adobe Suite, even IDEs like Visual Studio, JetBrain, SublimeText, VSCode, etc.

None of these are using "native UI" as you know. One of the reasons: "native UI" is not expressive enough. Another reason: these are complex UI systems with complex data model underneath and so complex update graphs. They prefer GC-able runtime environments for those reasons. Yet there are c), d) up until z) reasons why they do that, I can speak about that forever, e.g. Adobe Suite must be cross-platform, right?

So when you use "native UI" please take the above into consideration.

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

#49

Post by alexhutcheson »

stbn wrote: post #43
tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #40

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!"

Google Web Toolkit [1] does this. [1] http://www.gwtproject.org/

GWT hasn't had a new release since 2017: http://www.gwtproject.org/release-notes.html

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

#50

Post by realharo »

vijaybritto wrote: post #47
realharo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? If it works ok and doesn't eat battery/CPU too much when in background, then who cares? For exapmle I like that I can plug my phone into the speakers (yay headphone jack), and control the music from a laptop on the other side of the room. Also, it's more like 200 MB on my computer, most of which is predictably CEF. In comparison bundling Qt dlls would also add like 50MB if I remember correctly.

I'm talking about RAM not SSD. And no I don't have multiple computers in my house. A single laptop with 16G of RAM is all I have. I have to use it for work. We all know about music apps playing music while using less than 50M at any given time. If its in the background then even less. I know the dev experience is far greater in electron but its simply not performant. But if I were to launch a product on all platforms…

RAM's about the same, hovering slightly below 200MB (Windows shows a sum of all the different Chromium processes). Which for me is firmly in the "who cares" territory. Lightweight music apps don't have the online playlists, discovery mechanisms (Discover Weekly, etc.) and all that other stuff.
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