Really wish there was something like this, but C or Rust instead of Python Or JavaScript.
LibUI for C [0]
BeeWare Toga v0.4.0 – A Python native, OS native GUI toolkit
11–20 of 32 posts
Re: BeeWare Toga v0.4.0 – A Python native, OS native GUI toolkit
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tastes clearly differ then, because I've found the opposite. I find visual editor's really difficult to figure out, and I'm much happier when there's a quick to iterate on code-only way of laying out a GUI. Probably comes from having more experience with web frontends than native GUIs.
Which visual editors have you tried? I've had pleasant experiences with Lazarus, Delphi and Visual Basic, and unpleasant experiences with Qt Designer, Glade and some others.
Borland RAD tools were pure gold! In my high school years I've sweared by Delphi and C++ Builder.
Re: BeeWare Toga v0.4.0 – A Python native, OS native GUI toolkit
#13Is there a WYSIWYG GUI editor for this, a la Visual Basic? Because honestly, you can have the best GUI toolkit in the world but without a visual editor, building a GUI-rich app will still be incredibly tedious.
Tastes clearly differ then, because I've found the opposite. I find visual editor's really difficult to figure out, and I'm much happier when there's a quick to iterate on code-only way of laying out a GUI. Probably comes from having more experience with web frontends than native GUIs.
Seconding this, I outright avoid any GUI layout editor at this point.
Re: BeeWare Toga v0.4.0 – A Python native, OS native GUI toolkit
#14It looks pretty nice. I would say that they are falling into the same trap as other native toolkits, in that they are targeting win32/MFC components. As Windows users are probably going to be your number one utilizers of target applications, it's always weird that that experience is always the worst. Maybe target WPF/WinUI instead, for a more modern experience.
With each release of Windows there are less and less HWND/GDI based applications. Standard set of HWND/GDI controls (EDIT,COMBOBOX, BUTTON + so called common controls) is not changing since Win95 so it is a dead end. And in general modern UI tends to move to composition of UI from primitive ctls achieving rich agglomerates. Like in Web UIs: HWND/GDI is really dead for many reasons. Badly scalable on high-DPI, no alph…
GDI works fine for dpi scaling.
handle WM_DPICHANGED
recreate fonts with actual_dpi/reference_dpi scale factor and send WM_SETFONT
and apply scale factor to all DeferWindowPos() operations.Re: BeeWare Toga v0.4.0 – A Python native, OS native GUI toolkit
#15Is there a WYSIWYG GUI editor for this, a la Visual Basic? Because honestly, you can have the best GUI toolkit in the world but without a visual editor, building a GUI-rich app will still be incredibly tedious.
Tastes clearly differ then, because I've found the opposite. I find visual editor's really difficult to figure out, and I'm much happier when there's a quick to iterate on code-only way of laying out a GUI. Probably comes from having more experience with web frontends than native GUIs.
I think people who prefer and use GUI builders (generally "old-school" native devs) and those who write GUIs in code (generally web devs) design GUIs in different ways.
GUI-as-code makes dynamic layout easier, so those GUIs have more hiding and expanding elements. The GUI-as-data approach leans towards a static UI, disabling the elements that don't make sense right now. Dynamic elements exist only via hand-coded widgets, making GUIs more formulaic.
I may be seeing causality where there is none, though.
Re: BeeWare Toga v0.4.0 – A Python native, OS native GUI toolkit
#16I love this friendly two-way race between beeware and kivy for a new cross-platform python GUI framework. If they ever manage to break the android stranglehold and become first-class citizens on mobile this could be huge. For a wide range of data-sciency apps that would be the royal road.
Re: BeeWare Toga v0.4.0 – A Python native, OS native GUI toolkit
#17Is there a WYSIWYG GUI editor for this, a la Visual Basic? Because honestly, you can have the best GUI toolkit in the world but without a visual editor, building a GUI-rich app will still be incredibly tedious.
Tastes clearly differ then, because I've found the opposite. I find visual editor's really difficult to figure out, and I'm much happier when there's a quick to iterate on code-only way of laying out a GUI. Probably comes from having more experience with web frontends than native GUIs.
GUI visual editors fail when they ignore problems that Borland Delphi and C++ Builder solved brilliantly well over 20 years ago creating an incredibly quick and productive workflow, and yes, they can become an absolute mess because of this.
I can only dream of the day Lazarus (FOSS reimplementation of Delphi) will work with other languages beside Object Pascal.
Re: BeeWare Toga v0.4.0 – A Python native, OS native GUI toolkit
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tastes clearly differ then, because I've found the opposite. I find visual editor's really difficult to figure out, and I'm much happier when there's a quick to iterate on code-only way of laying out a GUI. Probably comes from having more experience with web frontends than native GUIs.
GUI visual editors fail when they ignore problems that Borland Delphi and C++ Builder solved brilliantly well over 20 years ago creating an incredibly quick and productive workflow, and yes, they can become an absolute mess because of this. I can only dream of the day Lazarus (FOSS reimplementation of Delphi) will work with other languages beside Object Pascal.
Which problems are those?
One problem I usually have with GUI builders is that they generate huge and messy data files for the layout which can't be meaningfully diffed. Visual Basic is even worse because the form files are binary blobs. Lazarus seems to use fairly concise and readable plain-text files for its forms, although there's also some sort of binary resource files.
Re: BeeWare Toga v0.4.0 – A Python native, OS native GUI toolkit
#19It's a shame that for a GUI toolkit, there are no screenshots, either on Github or the official project website. It's very difficult to evaluate this based on descriptions alone.
Re: BeeWare Toga v0.4.0 – A Python native, OS native GUI toolkit
#20It's a shame that for a GUI toolkit, there are no screenshots, either on Github or the official project website. It's very difficult to evaluate this based on descriptions alone.
They do have screenshots on the first page of the docs though, so that's at least something.