Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful • Hacker News Board

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#271

Post by ranger_danger » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 3:39 AM UTC

bpfrh wrote: post #8

popcalc wrote: post #3

>As a fellow European, I do not have air conditioning. Is anything stopping the author from buying a heat pump?

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…

Swamp coolers are cheap and don't need a window or drain.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#272

Post by cageface » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 3:40 AM UTC

eschaton wrote: post #88

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…

If instead of insisting on custom UI styling the author just used the system UI, they could probably build a pretty straightforward Windows application. It’s the scourge of “brand identity” that has people thinking graphical applications are hard. Same on the Mac: If you want to build a Mac application, your best bet will be AppKit or SwiftUI and using system controls. And when the OS updates your application will ei…

My experience with SwiftUI on the Mac is that it still needs a lot of work. Documentation is poor. Performance can be bad if you do things in a straightforward way. Supporting older versions of the OS is quite painful etc.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#273

Post by cageface » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 3:47 AM UTC

beart wrote: 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…

Flutter is actually quite nice and works well on desktop too. If Google continues to develop it I could see it becoming the first choice for a lot of developers.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#274

Post by hgs3 » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 4:01 AM UTC

> 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.

Implementing a custom paint routine is how you do theming in many UI toolkits. I get the impression the author is looking for a toolkit with declarative theming, like CSS.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#275

Post by smittywerben » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 4:07 AM UTC

Microsoft: Here are cool windows for Windows.

Microsoft: Oh, yeah, to use it, you'll need to deploy it with the Microsoft Store.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#276

Post by airstrike » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 4:13 AM UTC

Shoutout to the Rust library `iced` which is cross-platform, amazing, and can do anything you need it to at blazing fast speed and low memory footprint: https://github.com/iced-rs/iced

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#277

Post by fuzztester » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 4:19 AM UTC

dokka wrote: post #102

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…

Yeah, I can confirm that writing windows GUI apps is not at all painful for me. I still use Windows Forms in .NET 4.8 and my executables are < 1mb, Visual Studio's form designer is very easy to use, you can subclass all the .NET UI controls and customize them however you want. There's always been accessibility and even support for high DPI.

>I still use Windows Forms in .NET 4.8 and my executables are Do you need to ship any supporting files separately, along with the app?

And is .NET 4.8 or higher already on Windows PCs?

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#278

Post by rty32 » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 4:22 AM UTC

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…

Agree. "Single executable" combined with "less than 40mb" is just looking for trouble for what the author is trying to do. If you want to do win32, go ahead and give up styling. Otherwise, make compromises. I think many of these are excellent choices chosen by many programs that I use, it's the author's stringent requirements and unrealistic expectations that is holding back.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#279

Post by analog31 » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 4:24 AM UTC

jenadine wrote: post #177

EvanAnderson wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not a problem, it's a feature. 1000 times this. I want software I'm running to look like the rest of the OS (and every other application) and respect my OS-level UI preferences. In the case of Win32 using the OS primitive controls mean that your application gets tons of accessibility and preference features "for free" (albeit Microsoft has done a good job in later Windows releases of removing the functionali…

You seem to be in the minority with that thought. The evidence is that most apps nowadays comes with their own style, often packed in a HTML frontend. Users are used of websites which all have their own designs, and don't seem to mind if all apps have different look and feel.

Most users are unaware that there are UI standards, and have no basis for comparison. They use Google to help them figure out how to use apps, and take hand-written notes on how to find the things that they need. Once they figure out the functions in an UI that they need, they just pray that it doesn't change. The average user experience is horrific.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#280

Post by LordDragonfang » Mon, Jul 01, 2024, 4:34 AM UTC

ivm wrote: post #268

smackeyacky wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which particular .NET Gui? There is a collection of them: MAUI, WPF, Blazor Hybrid, WinUI. Microsoft have utterly screwed the pooch on getting their .NET GUI story straight.

WinUI 3 is the default for Windows-only applications

Except it's still missing a lot of controls, further development and bug fixes are practically at a standstill, and despite what TFA says, there is no visual designer support (which is a dealbreaker for many multidisciplinary teams).

As someone currently involved in switching our app from MFC, I really want to like MFC, but Microsoft's absolutely addled management of the whole thing is making it really difficult.