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Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

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Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#41

Post by chipdart »

Aurornis wrote: post #19

This is a good overview of some of the options, but the author’s specific requirements push it in a specific direction that eliminates a lot of options. Specifically, the requirement for completely custom GUI styling without writing his own render functions means it’s really a task of selecting easy, customizable GUI libraries rather than generic GUI work. The requirements to be self-contained executables and under a…

> This is a good overview of some of the options, but the author’s specific requirements push it in a specific direction that eliminates a lot of options.

The blogger sounds like they put up a bunch of arbitrary constraints that in normal circumstances wouldn't even be issues.

In the process it's those arbitrary whimsical choices that reject the very obvious choices along with any happy path.

For example, it's baffling that there are already a few FLOSS forks of Qt out there, but the blogger failed to cover them. If the author likes Qt so much, those would supposedly be the obvious choices. But no.

Once again, you are left out of options if you go out of your way to avoid each and any option.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#43

Post by criddell »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #11
markasoftware wrote: post #9

More accurately: + "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, portab…

Anyone can compile a static binary with FLTK and have the binary size start under 100KB.

You can do that with straight win32 as well. Steve Gibson has a bunch of utilities and most of them are pretty tiny. His DNS Benchmark is one of the larger utilities at 169k.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#45

Post by pugworthy »

It strikes me that having the C++ requirement is part of what makes this difficult. I'd like to have seen some reasoning why not to just use C#. Seems like it could have made some things easier, especially given the author's praise of XAML and acceptance of Visual Studio.

I'm not saying C# is better than C++, but just that choosing one over the other does have an impact.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#48

Post by chipdart »

alkonaut wrote: post #40

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 pa…

> 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.

What I find the most mind-numbing thing about the blog post is the way WinUI3 was excluded. WinUI3 looks like an exact match for the blogger's most critical requirements, specially the customization thing, and there is absolutely no better way to target Windows than Microsoft's official GUI offering, but somehow that one is rejected? Absurd.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#49

Post by criddell »

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…

> need to agree on a GUI interoperability

I hope they don’t. I like that the different platforms I use feel and look different. In fact, I wish there was more variety. I wish there were still Atari, and Amiga, and BeOS, Tandy, and all the other interesting platforms competing for users with different ideas of how computers should work.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#50

Post by nurettin »

magicalhippo wrote: post #26

Writing GUI apps for Windows in C++ is painful There, fixed it for ya. There are solutions if you're not hell-bent on using C++, be it .Net, Lazarus (FreePascal) or Delphi. We're using Delphi at work and for the most part it's super simple and easy.

Delphi comes with so many db drivers, a data layer that will let you do crud, and an app store that using it feels like cheating. Especially with devexpress controls.
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