Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
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Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
#2Go back in an emulator some time and try Visual Studio or even old Borland from the 1990s. Point, click, add code, set style, and the result was not bad at all. The whole UI looked consistent too with uniform controls, shortcuts, etc.
Today UI apps use 100X more memory, are slower, and are harder to use with little to show for it in terms of improved functionality. The whole desktop is a disaster of conflicting designs and accessibility or uniformity are practically gone.
Mobile is kind of shocking too. Here was a chance to dump cruft from desktop and do things better but the result really is just as much of a pain in the arse if not more. Consistency is a little better but the developer experience is awful and of course unlike desktop you really can’t develop on the actual device. That adds another layer of shit.
Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
#3Is anything stopping the author from buying a heat pump?
Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
#4Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
#5How about gtk?
I really wish GTK worked better cross-platform, but I mostly use it for Linux-only stuff. It's not humane to make Windows and Mac users suffer through it, unfortunately.
Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
#6Writing GUI apps is painful period, and it’s become more so not less in the last two decades. Go back in an emulator some time and try Visual Studio or even old Borland from the 1990s. Point, click, add code, set style, and the result was not bad at all. The whole UI looked consistent too with uniform controls, shortcuts, etc. Today UI apps use 100X more memory, are slower, and are harder to use with little to show f…
Larger memory footprints aren’t just from the GUI. There is a lot more functionality to deal with everywhere. Just handling modern security, encryption, and certificate checking stack can take up more space than entire executables from the early 90s.
I also have literally 100X more RAM now.
> are slower,
Im fairly certain everyone who says this has simply forgotten how slow mechanical hard drives were. I occasionally have to pull out a very old laptop, hope that it still boots, and do something on it. Everything is so painfully slow in ways I forgot about. It’s refreshing to return to my modern PC.
> and are harder to use with little to show for it in terms of improved functionality.
If you don’t think modern apps have more functionality, I don’t know what to tell you.
Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
#7>As a fellow European, I do not have air conditioning. Is anything stopping the author from buying a heat pump?
Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
#8>As a fellow European, I do not have air conditioning. Is anything stopping the author from buying a heat pump?
E.g. you can buy a heatpump but you can't drill the hole in the outer wall.
In germany and austria most if not all windows also either open fully to one side or basically bend inwards so you can't install the ac units you install directly into the windows[1].
[1]https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
edit: qualified the law statement
Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
#9+ "portable" (single exe with no automatic unzipping of dlls or anything)
+ commercial and unwilling to redistribute compiled object files (which together with the "portable" requirement, means no LGPL)
+ dark mode
Windows GUI apps is painful. Drop any one of these requirements and there are good established options.
Specifically I think most "portable" applications use win32 because, usually, portable => small, simple application where functionality is more important than dark mode or other styling ability.
Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
#10Writing GUI apps is painful period, and it’s become more so not less in the last two decades. Go back in an emulator some time and try Visual Studio or even old Borland from the 1990s. Point, click, add code, set style, and the result was not bad at all. The whole UI looked consistent too with uniform controls, shortcuts, etc. Today UI apps use 100X more memory, are slower, and are harder to use with little to show f…