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Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

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Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#101

Post by EvanAnderson »

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 functionality to set some of these preferences).

There is no value add in making your app UI look bespoke. All the labor you're putting into that work is labor that could be better spent on functionality, features, and optimization. When I see an overly "precious" UI on Windows (owner-drawn controls, animations, fades, etc) I immediately question the ability of the developer to prioritize.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#102

Post by dokka »

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.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#103

Post by swatcoder »

linguae wrote: post #87
criddell wrote: post #49

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…

There have been many frameworks that offered this and some still do. But it comes at the direct expense of design discipline, branding, and user experience optimization -- all of which have been elevetated to high concern over the 15 years or so.

Cross-platform "Native look and feel" currently works for some no-nonsense professional utitlies and hobby tools, but mostly makes software that's hard to sell, document, or support.

Most have just opted for common widget libraries instead, and frameworks have stepped up by providing rich libraries of such widgets and prioritizing features for customizing or complementing them even further.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#105

Post by cjbgkagh »

somenameforme wrote: post #68
Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #12

Apple and Microsoft underinvest in their widget toolkits. It’s especially damning for Apple since they spend the money to write numerous custom widgets (e.g., the widgets in their professional apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro) but don’t upstream. Nobody is inspired by yet another implementation of button or tab widgets.

No idea about Apple, but I'd strongly disagree for Microsoft. In one way of speaking, they invest too much. WinUI3, like the article mentions has such a sordid history. It started as WPF, and WPF was (is) awesome. It's simple, clean, runs on a bunch of different platforms, doesn't have a zillion dependencies, has a great community, and is just all around pleasant to work with. So naturally Microsoft decided to comple…

A lot of the best people left MS. People forget that MS was so completely dominant that it attracted a lot of talented people who wanted to do big things. Since then the competition from the FANG companies have brain drained them, not helped by MS insistence on paying less than their peers, sure there is no state income tax but the company shouldn’t be trying to capture all of that difference.

The net effect is that not only are they not capable of building things as well as they used to, they can’t even maintain what they already have. And how would anyone go about fixing such a culture. I think that’s a big part of why MS has been so generous to OpenAI while also keeping them at arms length.

Inertia is incredibly powerful and big companies can remain successful for long after their technical competence dissipates.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#106

Post by c-smile »

mathverse wrote: post #78
c-smile wrote: post #61

As of Sciter and "antialiasing" issues mentioned in the article... Author did not enable high-DPI support in his/her application. As simply as that... Either in Visual Studio : https://sciter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/high-dpi-aware... Or by including proper manifest: https://gitlab.com/sciter-engine/sciter-js-sdk/-/blob/main/d... That actually is explained in "Hello C++" tutorial: https://sciter.com/hello-cpp-t…

Sciter desperately needs an evangelist who can reply and help people with their problems and just in general provide support and work on the ecosystem. I think from what I remember from indiehackers you are not there yet to be able to afford it but we desperately need that. Even paying pravic to keep the libraries for different languages up to date would be of great help.

Sciter's support forum is pretty active : https://sciter.com/forums/

Mr. Yuri (Pravic) has his own agenda these days. As far as I know creation of Go, Rust and Python backends for Sciter was a method for him to determine best frontend technology for his organization.

If someone wants to take care about Go, Rust and Python wrappers - let me know.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#107

Post by jjmarr »

deutschepost wrote: post #73
Shorel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the issue with Qt exactly what the GPL intended? In that case, any Qt fork would force him to also comply with the GPL, and supply the source code of his project.

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.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#108

Post by fleabitdev »

Unlike Windows, Apple and Android have managed to publish modern UI libraries for their own platforms - but in both cases, this involved migrating the whole platform to a new programming language (Swift and Kotlin, respectively). If I remember right, C# also has a few features which were only added to make Windows Forms and WPF more ergonomic.

I'm starting to suspect that general-purpose languages just aren't flexible enough to keep up with changing fashions in UI development. Whenever somebody comes up with a new UI paradigm, you're not going to be able to take full advantage of it until somebody designs a new programming language with that paradigm in mind.

If so, this might explain why the Windows team keeps pushing new desktop UI libraries, only to abandon them within a few years - they just don't have the willingness or resources to migrate away from C# and C++, and so the quality of their UI libraries is stuck in 2006.

Re: Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful

#110

Post by userbinator »

crazygringo wrote: post #95
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…

As a non-Windows user, I'm confused, maybe you can clarify: > If you use the regular Win32 controls then they will automatically get the styling the user has set. Does that mean they'll get dark mode if the system is in dark mode? In which case I don't understand what the author is complaining about. Sounds like dark mode would be working as intended. They want "easy styling" but I took that to mean things like icons…

They'll get dark, light, rainbow, whatever the user has set.

This was a feature since at least Windows 3:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25871787

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