201–210 of 481 posts
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That sounds like the same ugly hack that caused programs not to be “32 bit clean” back in the day for Macs
Ah yes, these 68000 pointers have a spare 8 bits for me to use! Because nothing will ever need more than 16 MB of memory. Sigh.
Let me chime in and say that plain Win32 API is a perfectly viable option if you are using C++ (or another "OO" language) and if you are willing to sink a couple of weeks into writing your own MFC-like wrapper. Clearly this is not an option for those who are just starting up with Windows GUI work, but with little experience it is really a matter of 2-3 weeks of ground work and then you have full control over all nuan…
Wine is better at it than Windows itself. Especially for really old programs.
With Delphi creating of Native Windows Desktop Applications is a piece of cake (also does MacOS, iOS, Android and partially Linux). Yes it is by now obscure and expensive tool but I still use it to maintain my existing native GUI desktop applications. It is incredibly easy to use / develop with and single exe no dependencies deployment mode is superior. Compatibility between Windows versions is stellar as well.
There is also an opensource version of Delphi called Lazarus which is way less polished.
That is why everyone even Microsoft themselves does Electron. Running with html/css/js has benefits it really is open and free development based on international standards and not locked into any single big tech.
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In that light, it is troubling that Friday’s blog post [0] announced “moving core Windows experiences to the WinUI3 framework” as a measure to improve the quality of said experiences. [0] https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-com...
The only good thing to say about that is it removes the stupidity of using Electron (or the Microsoft Edge equivalent) for built-in Windows apps and the Start Menu. SMH.
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I feel like I'm the only person in the world who would rather write ugly win32 jank for the rest of my days than ever having to touch an "elegant" or "well structured" Cocoa codebase. In win32 if you want a button you call a function and pass a hande, in the Apple world you first subclass 7 interfaces in some unreadable Smalltalk-wannabe syntax and pray you don't need to access the documentation. And of course they c…
This is patently false. To add a button to your UI, you open your window’s nib file Xcode/Interface Builder, click the plus button on the toolbar, and add a button. Then you control-drag from the button to File’s Owner and choose the method that you want to invoke when the button is clicked. Done.
I'm an embedded programmer who occassionally needs to write various windows programs to interface with embedded devices (usually via serial port or usb), and I find it a breeze to write native gui programs in pure win32 and c++. Recently had to add a new feature to and old program that was last updated in the XP era and two things to note: 1. The program did not need to be updated to run on Vista, 7, 10 and 11, shit…
Most of the desktop applications I have wrote over the years have been in other languages like Java and Go as I have wanted them to mostly be cross platform. In these cases I have always used the Software UI, which in Java is Swing and in Go is Fyne. These are usually reasonably fast, don't necessarily look native depending on how its themed but ultimately fit the language better than trying to bridge to Win32 or GTK…
I just use JUCE. It solves all the problems I need solved on Windows and doesn’t lock me into anything. More and more, if its not cross platform C++, it just doesn’t make any sense to invest in it. This is getting more relevant as the years go by, alas.
I wonder if Unity (the game engine) actually has a sneaky potential here. It’s cross platform, fast, and maybe just maybe less bloated than carrying around an entire browser like Electron?
Just use Qt. Native, cross-platform, works like a champ.