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Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

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Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#301

Post by throwaway2037 »

Paradigma11 wrote: post #222
bpfrh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I bought a portable split system for 2400 EUR. Works pretty well since I have shutters and a balcony, I put the external part outside the window, pull down the shutters and seal the lower part of the window around the pipe with some stuff. Doesn't use lots of power if I cool to 26C. Well, today we had 34C outside, so it had to work a lot.

2400 EUR? Cripes, that is expensive. Do you mind to share the model?

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#302

Post by throwaway2037 »

cageface wrote: post #272
eschaton wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

    > Documentation is poor.
This is the first I heard about SwiftUI. Maybe I am mixed up and docs are excellent for Swift, but not SwiftUI?

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#303

Post by throwaway2037 »

elpocko wrote: post #55
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…

Dear ImGui is for development/debug tools, not an UI for the end-user. It's great for small projects as long as you don't care about accessibility, or proper keyboard support, or adherence to standard UI conventions, or support for devices without GPUs, proper font rendering, etc. ...

    > proper keyboard support
Specifically, what does this mean?

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#304

Post by throwaway2037 »

fuzztester wrote: post #277
dokka wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

.NET 4.8 is default in Win10/11 now.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#305

Post by Closi »

kirubakaran wrote: post #248
Closi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume OP means slower on like-for-like hardware, rather than slower when run on a PC from the 90s, but to be fair the WinForms/WPF component of old GUI's was very fast even on legacy hardware.

Your profile doesn't list your email, so I'm posting here... is this the paper you were looking for? https://depts.washington.edu/acelab/proj/dollar/index.html Your original post for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26152600

It was!! That’s absolutely amazing, what a surprise after all these years :)

Many thanks for hunting me down in some comments!

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#306

Post by throwaway2037 »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #168
criddell wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like win32 and you can get a lot smaller with win32, but there are a lot of things missing. FLTK has a lot of components, component layouts, fonts, file system stuff, networking, audio, an openGL context, image loading and it's cross platform.

I'm confused. What is "missing" from Win32? To be clear, I count all base DLLs included with Windows a "Win32". One thing I can think of from your list: component layouts. Resizable windows with component layout is awful in Win32.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#307

Post by cageface »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #302
cageface wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Documentation is poor. This is the first I heard about SwiftUI. Maybe I am mixed up and docs are excellent for Swift, but not SwiftUI?

Yes. Two different things. The SwiftUI docs are mostly just listings of functions and not much explanation of how to use them.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#308

Post by dkersten »

Dear ImGui is nice but beyond basic styling, it’s not exactly quick and easy to style. It also lacks any kind of accessibility features, which is fine when you’re making tools for games or similar (ie highly visual tools), but if you’re making anything meant for a wider audience, you really should use something with solid accessibility support so stuff like screen readers work.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#309

Post by kelnos »

Lariscus wrote: post #230

I have a very low opinion of developers who decry having to pay for a commercial licence for otherwise LGPL licensed software libraries. They expect to be paid for their work, and ensure that by creating closed source software. That's fair enough. Yet, the devs that solved the actually difficult parts of creating a UI library have to be utter saints who freely bestow a gift of code upon the world.

Agreed. Also didn't get why he felt complying with the terms of the LGPL for a statically-linked .exe would be so much of a problem. Just put the object files and build script in a zip file, and upload it to the same webserver where you plan to put the program. Add a line in the "About" dialog (or whatever) pointing to it. Done.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#310

Post by athanagor2 »

wolpoli wrote: post #287

> The result should be a single .exe file with no or minimal dependencies and a size of less than 40MB Computers come with a modern browser now. Instead of a .exe file, could it be, let's say, a single .html file with inlined image/css/javascript?

Yeah I thought of this too. Wrapping this with Tauri should not be too hard, and quite space-efficient
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