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Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

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Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#131

Post by bombolo »

Waterluvian wrote: post #54
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #9

The native side of this has long been addressed by cross-platform toolkits including but not limited to: Qt, GTK, FLTK, WxWidgets (note: all FLOSS, at least optionally). Alas, web development "decided" to completely reinvent the wheel for all this stuff, leading to a new generation of heading-to-native toolkits derived from browser-based technologies, such as Electron, React Native and Flutter. Unless you believe the…

I don’t necessarily disagree with any of this. But the toolkits first listed are all pretty poor if you care about aesthetics and UX. It’s like making furniture with framing lumber and OSB. It’ll work fine and be durable. But it just always feels not great. They generally feel, to me, a semitone sharper than portability with 90s Java applications.

How can they look ugly when they just use the system look by default and can be themed to look like anything at all?

Have you ever used any of them?

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#132

Post by bombolo »

k__ wrote: post #65
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #9

The native side of this has long been addressed by cross-platform toolkits including but not limited to: Qt, GTK, FLTK, WxWidgets (note: all FLOSS, at least optionally). Alas, web development "decided" to completely reinvent the wheel for all this stuff, leading to a new generation of heading-to-native toolkits derived from browser-based technologies, such as Electron, React Native and Flutter. Unless you believe the…

Every now and then I meet a Qt dev who's whining about how Electron stole their lunch. If something like Electron stole your lunch, Qt obviously had serious problems.

Do you also meet chefs complain about how mcdonald takes work away?

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#133

Post by bombolo »

scarface74 wrote: post #49
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don't actually want cross-platform apps at all, but either single-platform apps, or apps developed independently for both platforms (because otherwise you're just talking about some in-house cross-platform toolkit).

Why do I as a Mac user care about cross platform apps? Even as a long time Windows user, why would I care about cross platform apps? I chose a platform because the platform and the apps meet my set of priorities. As far as how that affects Linux users, even if I did prefer Linux as a developer platform, why make it my daily driver instead of running it in a VM or with something like WSL2?

> Why do I as a Mac user care about cross platform apps?

Because there aren't enough macs in the world for people to make apps just for you, it seems.

> why make it my daily driver instead of running it in a VM or with something like WSL2?

Why run a fast OS when I can run the same fast OS within a slow VM and a bunch of other limitations?

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#134

Post by [deleted] »

scarface74 wrote: post #39
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then, on the other hand, you'll rarely see Linux ports. Lowest Common Denominator apps have been a blessing for Linux users - we would have never had Visual Studio Code, Slack, Postman, and who knows what else otherwise; and you can't tell me any of their developers would've done the work to port everything to GTK or Qt otherwise.

Isn’t that a problem that Linux only has crappy cross platform apps that are not as good as native apps? Why would I run a Linux box as my daily driver instead of a my Mac that is real Unix, has a 16 hour battery life and I can get great polished native apps?

[deleted]

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#135

Post by [deleted] »

scarface74 wrote: post #69
muyuu wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I see the ossified bifurcation between users and developers as a major defeat that perhaps I won't live to see reversed. It was not set in stone that people would be by design dumbed down progressively as computing caught on, rather than assimilated into the computing world as 1st class citizens. In a parallel universe something like the Smalltalk, LISP or Forth machines were widely adopted and the dichoto…

Yes and I’m sure that car mechanics are also tsk tsking about everyone that drives a car doesn’t know how to fix one. I’m sure they also thing that cars have been “dumbed down”. I’ve been programming for a long time (since doing assembly in the 80s). My second job out of college was for a small company where I was a developer and also had to manage a SAN, a dozen computers that ran jobs, mail servers, ftp servers, My…

[deleted]

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#136

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Waterluvian wrote: post #54
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #9

The native side of this has long been addressed by cross-platform toolkits including but not limited to: Qt, GTK, FLTK, WxWidgets (note: all FLOSS, at least optionally). Alas, web development "decided" to completely reinvent the wheel for all this stuff, leading to a new generation of heading-to-native toolkits derived from browser-based technologies, such as Electron, React Native and Flutter. Unless you believe the…

I don’t necessarily disagree with any of this. But the toolkits first listed are all pretty poor if you care about aesthetics and UX. It’s like making furniture with framing lumber and OSB. It’ll work fine and be durable. But it just always feels not great. They generally feel, to me, a semitone sharper than portability with 90s Java applications.

> But the toolkits first listed are all pretty poor if you care about aesthetics and UX.

You think that this is pretty poor in terms of aesthetics and UX?

https://musescore.org/en/4.0

Written with Qt. For at least 3 platforms.

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#137

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

klodolph wrote: post #62
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is costly to just reimplement your UI for multiple platforms, but that's where the "closed ecosystems" come in. React Native is kind of a compromise between the Qt-style approach (cross-platform UX) and the native approach. You're given a framework which works with multiple native toolkits, and you can have a mix of cross-platform UI code and platform-specific UI code. I don't understand this claim at all. Qt (o…

> I don't understand this claim at all. Qt (or GTK) let's you "escape out" to the "native" toolkit on Windows or macOS as needed. You're kind of fighting against Qt or GTK when you do that. Qt and GTK have their own widgets. React Native is more of a framework that uses native toolkits to begin with, so it starts out with much better alignment with platform expectations, and has better interoperability with platform…

> or choose to use something like React Native

Finally took a look, and this appears to be mobile only. Certainly covers one definition of cross-platform, but a little different than the other toolkits we've discussed.

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#138

Post by giantrobot »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #119
giantrobot wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The differences aren't always surface level aesthetics. Say in a toolkit the text input widgets don't support pasting content. An app using it will behave materially different than any other on the system. Not only that it might look ok but lack functionality necessary to the user. This is not hard to imagine since various UI frameworks have long had issues with different paste board systems on Linux.

> Say in a toolkit the text input widgets don't support pasting content. That's a bug. > various UI frameworks have long had issues with different paste board systems on Linux In my experience on *nix (37 years, going back to SunOS), the paste board systems for X Window are very well defined, and the only UI frameworks that have "long had issues" with them are buggy and not widely used. Are you thinking of something…

Pasting between Xlib, GNOME, and Qt apps was a shit show for years. The situation has improved significantly since the advent of Freedesktop.org but there used to be lots of problems. It doesn't matter if a UX problem is a bug or design problem. A user doesn't control if some app decides to use some unpopular UI framework. It's a Linux-on-the-desktop problem no matter the ultimate cause of the issue.

There's still issues today on Linux with keyboard shortcuts. Some apps use Ctrl+Shift and others use only Ctrl, there's no way to know what an app uses a priori. You have to hope the shortcut is displayed in the menu and you remember it when you need to actually use it. Different frameworks have different default shortcuts for common behaviors. Accessibility for any individual app is still hit or miss, same with localization and theming. Mac and Windows users don't face anywhere near the same impedance mismatch between various first and third party applications. Those systems are far from perfect but they're usually much more consistent UX than a Linux desktop.

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#139

Post by scarface74 »

mroche wrote: post #123
scarface74 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The discussion is about cross platform “frameworks” versus writing apps using the native frameworks. Adobe and Microsoft basically use native frameworks for most of their apps. It’s the difference between most of Office and Teams and VSCode.

On the flip side, nearly all groups in the VFX industry author their apps with Qt and deliver across Linux, macOS, and Windows. The "native" side of things is where people usually end up having the most debate, typically around appearance. VFX and creative apps tend to choose to look and behave consistently across platforms within their own context, rather than trying to utilize the human interface guidelines (HIG) o…

So if it’s “themed” to look “native”, what happens when the vendor chooses to change the theme of the native widgets? Do the themed widgets automatically support the user’s localization and internationalization preferences? Does it support the accessibility affordances that you could get for free when you use the native toolkit?

> Apple can make first party applications that abide exclusively by their HIG, and the same with Microsoft, but asking vendors targetting multiple platforms to do so and essentially support multiple versions of their apps to achieve "true native" when "seemingly" or "close-to" native via the toolkits widgets, built in theming capabilities, and backend abstractions are available can be a bit of a tall ask.

And could that be part of the reason that Microsoft and Adobe - both with a multi decade history of writing cross platform apps that use the native frameworks of the target platform are really the only two software companies that are really still successful making desktop consumer/prosumer software?

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#140

Post by scarface74 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #107
scarface74 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you regard it as backwards that Apple and Microsoft give users what they prefer including a better user experience? Do you seriously wonder why the “the year of the Linux desktop” never came? And what good is this supposed “technical superiority” if it doesn’t have any end use benefit? Does it integrate with my other hardware seamlessly like my headphones that switch automatically between my phone, computer and wa…

Laptops are a different category. I use one, but only for travelling. Most of the time, I work on a massively multicore self-built AMD-based system which is cheap, incredibly powerful and almost silent. My power comes from the sun, and I don't have to care about battery life. My AMD system has better audio performance than any Apple system I could buy (and I can even run Mojave on it, with better $-per-cpu-cycle than…

So when will that day come? Microsoft and Apple have been the dominant desktop OS since the mid 80s. Yes I realize that Apple has hovered between 10-20% since the mid 80a
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