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Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

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Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#391

Post by Lariscus »

hsn915 wrote: post #373
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.

I think his complaint is not that he has to pay money per se, but having to pay several thousand dollars. That's a bit much for an independent developer.

I have little sympathy for that kind of argument, imagine a carpenter complaining that they have to buy wood and nails. Besides, a Qt license for small businesses is nowhere near thousands of dollars. Only in software development do we expect quality tools to be given to us free of charge with no strings attached.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#392

Post by daemin »

hsn915 wrote: post #373
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.

I think his complaint is not that he has to pay money per se, but having to pay several thousand dollars. That's a bit much for an independent developer.

It's especially hard when the application you're building isn't yet proven. As there's no guarantee that it will get any sales, let alone enough to cover the Commercial Qt expenses.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#393

Post by daemin »

Lariscus wrote: post #391
hsn915 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his complaint is not that he has to pay money per se, but having to pay several thousand dollars. That's a bit much for an independent developer.

I have little sympathy for that kind of argument, imagine a carpenter complaining that they have to buy wood and nails. Besides, a Qt license for small businesses is nowhere near thousands of dollars. Only in software development do we expect quality tools to be given to us free of charge with no strings attached.

Qt for Application Development Professional (ADP) is 3460 €/Year.

If you're making something which you sell for $50 or so you'd need 100 sales per year to just pay for the development environment. That also assumes that it took you less than a year to make said product.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#394

Post by zigzag312 »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #101
userbinator wrote: post #85

Problem: It is extremely hard to stylize native Win32 controls. That's not a problem, it's a feature. I am absolutely bloody sick of apps that go out of their way to reinvent the standard UI controls in perplexing ways and behave unexpectedly. Following the system UI preferences is what you should do, and it irritates your users if you don't. There is a “hidden” dark mode for Win32 controls used by Windows File Explo…

> 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…

> I want software I'm running to look like the rest of the OS

This is an impossible task on Windows, as it has multiple, inconsistent UIs by itself.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#395

Post by beagle3 »

rfoo wrote: post #343
beagle3 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment makes me feel like I live on a different planet. In 1999, I built a completely custom Win32 GUI for a (brandable) chat application - that was the product the company I worked for was selling. Pure C and C++. It was a 32-bit app, not 64 bits. And we felt bad for it being 250KB single executable (skin included in resource section) and not “150KB or less” as was our initial target. But making it accessible…

> but 40MB. Oh man. It is perfectly fine to build a 150KB or less executable today. But then OP decided they don't want to write paint functions for custom GUI and insist on finding a library to do so, I guess that's not what you did in 1999, right?

I actually used FLTK for the first iteration; The theming support it had at the time was not sufficient, though, and the i18n story non existent (that was before even 1.0, versions were still labeled by dates).

So, because pervasive theming/branding was a hard requirement, and i18n a softer one (every skin has to only support one locale), i had to abandon FLTK. But FLTK did spoil me by providing seamless flicker free double buffering out of the box, which I insisted on implementing in our gui.

For those of you who don’t remember - Win32 flickered badly on almost all screen updates, window resizes, etc — I think that was generally true of most apps until 2010 or so. FLTK was essentially the only GUI toolkit at the time (1999) that had no flicker out of the box.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#398

Post by jmkni »

hnthrowaway0328 wrote: post #65
mordechai9000 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean Visual Basic for Applications? How are you creating a GUI in Excel?

I think there is a thing called Microsoft Office development kit or some other name that allows C# and other .Net programs to manipulate Office apps. Not sure if it's what the author meant, though.

I remember using Office Interop back in the day

Less useful these days as we use open formats, ie doc is propriatery, docx is open

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#399

Post by p0w3n3d »

I've been a strong lover of Qt, but I've just undestood that one cannot statically link it. Tbh it's never been the case in my situation, usually writing in PySide bindings which will never link dll/so libraries, however in certain situations this would get really expensive, if static linking would be required.

   I am writing this article while it’s 32°C inside my room.
It took a horrendous heat to make a programmer find the best GUI library, but it was worth it! 500KB for imgui? Seriously? I remember Inno Setup creator saying that we was compiling his 'boot' application (to reduce size, because it was glued as a prefix to a zip file) in Delphi 2...
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