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Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

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Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#151
I don't see any mention of WinAmp yet. That app really whipped the llamas ass when it came to styling. And was super easy to create custom skins.

I'm all-on-board with look like the OS/platform but also, here's and example of custom styling done well.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#152
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LGPL. Which eliminates his requirement for a single executable. With LGPL you are only allowed to link dynamically.

The goal of this is so that end-users can modify or update Qt, the LGPL licensed component. The LGPL is working as intended.

Yes. But the article states that they don’t care about that. They just want a single executable.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#153
post #27

Writing GUI apps is painful everywhere, and has been for years. I remember the half-baked transition from Windows Forms to WPF, which was then taken-over by the Windows Phone initiative, which was also extremely painful and half-baked. There's a reason electron is so popular, despite all the complaints about it as a platform. Don't blame the electron devs, blame Microsoft for completely failing to support their own p…

The lack of windows support for windows GUI's on windows is mind blowing. I remember absolutely whipping up Visual Basic line of business apps using the form designer in Visual Studio and data bound controls etc. If you wanted more there was MFC (with MTL developed by some insiders I guess at microsoft)

The absolute insanity of going to WPF (wasn't data binding via reflection -> these apps got horribly sluggish!) then to UWP (monster controls for touch I guess?) is honestly mind blowing. The emphasis on Universal Windows Platform as "the future" of app development is absurd. Every time the design language behind this infects another settings app in windows we LOSE functionality! Can you even have more than one settings window open anymore with the new and improved UWP?

Then there is WinUI? Then there is MAUI? THen there is blazor on the desktop?

Has Microsoft confused you yet? They've confused me. Each of these introduced as the best thing since sliced bread, and back with tooling with broken forms designers and more.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#154
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I wonder how possible it is to design a cross-platform GUI framework that not only uses the native UI widgets of each underlying platform, but also respects each platform's human interface guidelines. I'd imagine this would be very hard work, especially the part about respecting each platform's HIG, but the increased power of AI tools could potentially make this task easier. Such a framework could potentially be an a…

I’ve been thinking more lately about a library which defines an interface for GUI elements, and then leaves implementing that up to you. Something like MVC (or some other design pattern) where the view part is an interface definition.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#155
> It would require me to write a custom paint function for every single control, which would take so much time I could raise a family in the meantime

This is a weird comment that shows the philosophy of old school win32 has not clicked for them. The key element in win32 is the wndproc. Most controls ask their parent what color they should be via a window message.

If you find this inconvenient, wrapping that in a small library to remove boiler plate is not a big deal.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#156
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, among other things both Apple-unique and emacs-esque text navigation shortcuts are in every native textfield across all apps and anything that's a menu item in any app can have its shortcut key rebound in System Settings without any extra work on the part of third-party devs. It's one of the reasons why longtime Mac users are disinclined towards non-native apps. Most don't bother to reproduce these behaviors, an…

Annoyingly enough you don't really all keyboard shortcuts out of the box even if you build natively. If you create a Button(role: .destructive).keyboardShortcut(.defaultAction) in a SwiftUI dialog, you don't get Cmd+D as the shortcut even though Finder (and I think other apps too) uses Cmd+D as the keyboard shortcut for destructive confirmation dialogs. Thankfully at least a Button without destructive role will get E…

Yeah for now I keep most of my usage of SwiftUI restricted to non-Mac platforms. On macOS it’s fine for smaller bits like collectionview cells but has a number of rough edges for more major use cases.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#157
post #76

Who's going to tell him about C++ Builder (Embarcadero)?

No one wants to talk about it or Delphi anymore. Programmers are just as fashion-concious as the Milan catwalk designers.

This. But flares are still waiting to come back in this case. To get my foot in the door writing windows GUI programs I often have to obfuscate the fact I am using Delphi (don't ask, don't tell) or work with clients without big IT departments.

Disclaimer - No clients were ever injured during this experiment.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#158

Just use WinUI 3. Opting into MSIX packaging no longer requires an App Container sandbox. More info here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/desktop/deskt... Full disclosure: I work at Microsoft.

runFullTrust apps are still subject to file system and registry redirection as well as various capability checks. Running fully unencumbered requires restricted capabilities that only Microsoft can approve.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#159

For requirements like that, I typically write WPF C# frontend, combined with C++ backend. Compared to ImGui, in WPF you’ll get a GUI designer, styling which allows easy dark mode, data bindings, data templates, animations, IDE support like live visual tree inspector, accessibility support, and more. If you use the legacy .NET 4 framework, the .NET runtime will come pre-installed on modern Windows. If you compile your…

WPF has been superseded (supposedly) by UWP / WinGUI / MAUI / Blazor?

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#160

Just use WinUI 3. Opting into MSIX packaging no longer requires an App Container sandbox. More info here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/desktop/deskt... Full disclosure: I work at Microsoft.

For >1 minute incremental compile times? No thanks.
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