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Windows native app development is a mess

domenic.me

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Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#451

Post by philistine »

leptons wrote: post #442
philistine wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't software development about making money? On phones, if you want to make money you have to target iOS, since this is where you have the people with money to spend on software. Do you believe that the vastly larger installed base of Windows guarantees more money for everyone?

>On phones, if you want to make money you have to target iOS It's funny that you think Android users are broke-ass nobodies. That's some reality-distortion-field fanboi nonsense. And it's also hilarious that you think phone apps are useful software that costs lots of money. Most people in tech with high-paying jobs that I know are using Android, because it's actually pretty awesome compared to the locked-down walled-…

Way to go with anecdata to try and disentangle your feelings from reality. Come back when you have cold hard facts. With 27% of the market, they make twice as much money on their app store.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/06/05/app-store-just-ha...

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#452

Post by domenicd »

naizarak wrote: post #359
dlopes7 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the same at all, you are pretty much turning the screen off with that

Isn't that the point? What's the benefit of blacking-out a display instead of putting it in no-signal standby?

This is covered in the article:

> Turning them off will cause Windows to spasm for several seconds and throw all your current window positioning out of whack.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#453

Post by eviks »

> knew I wanted to use the latest and greatest first-party foundation. That meant writing a WinUI 3 app, using the Windows App SDK

No it doesn't? That's "the latest", but not "the greatest", and as "a Windows guy" you should know both the meme "wait until sp1" and the principle behind that about the inverse relationship between the two factors in that phrase

> what is the point of using Microsoft’s latest and greatest, if half your code is just interop goop to get at the old APIs?

Good point! Don't, wait until they realize their newest toy isn't popular enough, throw it away and create a new one - use that instead!

> One might think that an advantage of controlling C# would be that Microsoft has carefully shaped and coevolved it to be the perfect programming language for Windows APIs

No one using anything of theirs would ever think that!

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#454

Post by eviks »

bc_programming wrote: post #341
userbinator wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The functionality of that is not hard at all. A few checkboxes, a trackbar, and a hotkey control (there is actually a standard Win32 control for this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/hot... ), with "pushlike" checkboxes at the top to be drawn replicating the monitor layout. But that "modern" style is... disgusting and repulsive. That whole dialog is bigger than one of my monitors due to how m…

My favourite example of "Modern" style is the toggle switch, shown even in that image. I laugh a lot of the times I see one, it's the 'replacement' for the checkbox, but it's so awful at actually telegraphing it's current state in a consistent way- (the entire purpose of the control!) that it has to have a label indicating whether it's on or off. I find it so absurd that people genuinely put this stuff into their pro…

But think of the poor users expecting consistency with their phones where confusion is expected!

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#455

Post by eviks »

kageroumado wrote: post #84
user____name wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can now use SwiftUI, which is, as of the latest version, quite stable. They used to change things a lot between releases a few years ago, but nowadays you don't need to refactor your code every year. Only issue with it is that it's iOS first, so you may need to fallback to AppKit (Cocoa) to implement more complex elements.

> as of the latest version, quite stable

Until the next latest version?

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#456

Post by eviks »

userbinator wrote: post #228
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the earliest security issues that I remember hitting Windows was that if you had a server running IIS, anyone could easily put a properly encoded string in the browser and run any command by causing IIS to shell out to cmd. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security-updates/securityb... I mentioned in another reply the 12 different ways that you had to define a string depending on which API you had to call. Ca…

Better to have known unknowns, than unknown unknowns.

Except the former doesn't eliminate the latter

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#457

Post by renegade-otter »

apatheticonion wrote: post #364
userbinator wrote: post #227

I agree with all the comments here saying "stick with Win32" --- this is "a mess" that you can easily avoid. Speaking as a long-time Win32 programmer, the requirements for your app are doable in a few KB (yes, kilobytes --- my vague estimate is less than 8KB) standalone executable. This is how I arrived at that: Enumerating the machine’s displays and their bounds A few API calls. Probably a few hundred bytes. Placing…

Using Win32 to write a UI in Windows is like pulling teeth. There are bindings for Rust but even still it's a nightmare. MacOS is slightly better but Apple's anti-competitive practices targeting developers makes it a tough sell. Linux is better still, technically, but due to the fragmented desktop environment landscape and distribution difficulties, it's also a hard sell. I think it's fair to say that the entire stor…

What about Qt? I am asking - I really don't know.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#458

Post by user34283 »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #414
user34283 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With WinUI 3 I did not even manage to render PNGs correctly. The colors were always slightly off and oversaturated, no matter what setting I used. I migrated the app to Tauri and the PNGs of course rendered perfectly. The implementation was much easier overall.

Hypothesis: This could be due to the toolkit's handling of color profiles. You see this a lot in macOS land with images that use a Display P3 colour profile, e.g. screenshots from a Mac or iPhone. Native toolkits are usually more advanced and tend to properly support the colour profiles and allow for wider gamut output. Whereas historically the web had poor handling and would assume sRGB, causing more "washed out" ou…

I believe that the opposite was the case: WinUI does not handle color profiles correctly.

In the browser or the Windows Photos app they were looking correct, while WinUI was incorrectly oversaturated.

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#459

Post by leptons »

philistine wrote: post #451
leptons wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On phones, if you want to make money you have to target iOS It's funny that you think Android users are broke-ass nobodies. That's some reality-distortion-field fanboi nonsense. And it's also hilarious that you think phone apps are useful software that costs lots of money. Most people in tech with high-paying jobs that I know are using Android, because it's actually pretty awesome compared to the locked-down walled-…

Way to go with anecdata to try and disentangle your feelings from reality. Come back when you have cold hard facts. With 27% of the market, they make twice as much money on their app store. https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/06/05/app-store-just-ha...

Making money does not equate to popularity. It only means their users are suckers for overpaying. $1000 for a monitor stand? $700 for 4 tiny wheels? Yet people pay these absurd prices for their niche over-hyped and over-priced hardware. "A fool and their money are soon parted."

Re: Windows native app development is a mess

#460

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

fermentation wrote: post #291
vegasje wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't well-known, so I figured I'd mention it. Microsoft offers a service called Azure Artifact Signing (used to be called Trusted Signing) that manages code signing for you: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/artifact-s... It's $9.99/mo, and you don't need to worry about procuring or renewing code signing certs.

Except this requires you to own a business for 3+ years, which makes it a non-starter for indie apps.

Not anymore: Artifact Signing is now generally available (GA), to anyone with an Azure account in the US, Europe, or the UK[1].

[1]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft-security-...

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