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Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

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Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#31

Post by bpfrh »

mdorazio wrote: post #17
bpfrh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on if he lives in a apartment some country/cities have laws against doing any work in the appartment that impacts the outside without permission from the house owner. 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…

Are portable AC units not available in Europe? They are inefficient but can sit inside next to the window and only require that you partially block off a window opening.

They are but not as efficient and so most people don't bother(that I know of).

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#32

Post by nasretdinov »

mjevans wrote: post #24

Windows (MS) and OSX (Apple) need to agree on a GUI interoperability API. Either hammer something out, or adopt one/more of the OSS GUI framework specifications from QT and GTK. It MUST be open spec. It MUST be free for all/any to implement. It MUST either be included or be in the primary vendor (MS, Apple, distro) software center. A simple Hello World, click OK to exit the program application should be able to be cr…

I think OpenStep actually had something like this in mind and had a Windows implementation too. It's apparently even used in Apple Windows apps like Safari, but of course it must not be complete enough to be able to fully replace native Windows API, and the incentive isn't there either.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#33

Post by cjk2 »

7thaccount wrote: post #23
cjk2 wrote: post #13

The painful bit is C++. I did a fair bit of that going back to MFC. Knocking stuff out in C# with WPF and WinForms was quite nice in comparison. I haven’t found anything nicer.

C# with WPF or WinForms only seems nice in comparison to other relatively painful tools IMO. The old RAD graphical tools and newer ones like Rebol (that are now dated) show just what is possible. Mathematica is also pretty powerful and doesn't require a ton of code.

Totally agree with this.

I’ll get shot for this one but I write most of my GUIs in Excel these days.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#36

Post by bpfrh »

gibsonpil wrote: post #28
mdorazio wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are portable AC units not available in Europe? They are inefficient but can sit inside next to the window and only require that you partially block off a window opening.

I don't know what landlords are like in European countries, but some landlords in America forbid people from connecting any kind of AC exhaust port to a window.

It's funny that in this case the law now protects you.

Generally anything you do indoor that falls under normal usage(painting walls, hanging furniture with big screws,etc.) is ok without approval, at least in my country/city(austria) and the land lord can't deny any of this and is not even required to be notified.

As you would have an open window and a not so noise machine running this would be ok, but energy efficiency is quite bad and you lose the benefits of the thermal insulation of your building.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#37

Post by canistel »

Native widgets which used to be wxWidgets' strong point, is now its Achilles heel? It is saddening, but the world moves on I guess.

Sadly the same applies to Lazarus/LCL too. Not only that, I had a nasty surprise recently when Fedora Budgie did not install GTK2 by default.

Win32 era was fun, for development and for reversing. But alas...

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#38

Post by ogoffart »

I'm working on a GUI toolkit that should match the requirements: Slint - https://slint.dev Can be compiled statically in a single .exe that is smaller than 40M. Has a license that allow proprietary on desktop for free. Has dark/light styles. Even comes with a (work in progress) drag and drop WYSISYG editor.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#39

Post by [deleted] »

mjevans wrote: post #24

Windows (MS) and OSX (Apple) need to agree on a GUI interoperability API. Either hammer something out, or adopt one/more of the OSS GUI framework specifications from QT and GTK. It MUST be open spec. It MUST be free for all/any to implement. It MUST either be included or be in the primary vendor (MS, Apple, distro) software center. A simple Hello World, click OK to exit the program application should be able to be cr…

[deleted]

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#40

Post by alkonaut »

While it’s a bit cumbersome, he doesn’t really point out any major flaw with the WinForms/WPF ideas, other than of course requiring two stacks. He says he wants native code and wouldn’t want any C# visible but doesn’t explain why. Fear of reverse engineering? UI code rarely contains anything secret.

Also the single exe deployment, while convenient at times, is perhaps not worth the hassle in this scenario. Using a packager like Velopack (squirrel) makes it a single exe to distribute and as an added bonus makes it self updating. That it has two or more files on disk when installed seems like a good tradeoff.

Windows is the worst platform to develop desktop apps for, apart from all the others.

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