Nire Bryce

@NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

she/they (pl)
breadthcharge.net/

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.

Nire Bryce @NireBryce6/21/2023, 2:40 AM

in my experience, overwhelmingly the people requesting "native" windows apps over electron or QT or whatever have never had to make windows apps that look good.

because it's so much harder, at least c. 2020 last I tried. So much harder.

Hard enough that if you asked your bank or ISP or DMV for a windows application, you'd almost certainly get something written in visual basic that's got Windows 2000 titlebars. honestly probably true for most small applications. Everything would look like windirstat. Which is fine, I'm not knocking the look. But there's perspective to be had here.

but for equal budget, you aren't going to get an equal windows app, for any windows app or budget unless you're a bigcorp and can just straight up hire 9 year windows GUI devs or whatever

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @NireBryce's post:

Dr Cassandra Granade @cgranade6/21/2023, 3:00 AM

Hot take, but VB4 was the last time it was easy to make Windows apps look good.

Nire Bryce @NireBryce6/21/2023, 3:01 AM

im not knocking VB but the same sort of people who demand these things tend to be the sort of people who hate VB.

but also windows should have a better UI workflow lol.

the best way to make windows GUI apps right now is to include WSLgui as a dependency and then run it via gnome. This is a joke but it also isn't.

Dr Cassandra Granade @cgranade6/21/2023, 3:07 AM

I say that as one of those people who hates VB. I still have to acknowledge, though, that it solved a few important problems that became unsolved along the way.

Nire Bryce @NireBryce6/21/2023, 3:00 AM

I guess you could use python. I don't know what TK applications look like with minimal effort put into them.

But I imagine it's like java swing but looks like it's from 2008 instead of 1998

💤🌵🤖@cactus6/21/2023, 3:21 AM

there's this cool thing called ttk that means your tk apps can look perfectly defensible as long as you aren't doing anything particularly involved. i don't think it's quite as good as wxWidgets (although i did try a bit harder in the tkinter version i think) but it's still decent

Nire Bryce @NireBryce6/21/2023, 4:04 AM

the issue is now figuring out a way your users don't hate to get them to run python applications, because everyone whines about something. Though pycon claims it's gotten better since '21

💤🌵🤖@cactus6/21/2023, 5:07 AM

it can hardly have gotten worse! if your users don't mind also installing python, zipapp is cool, as long as you don't have dependencies (which is why i moved vidslice from wxPython to tkinter). but if you have dependencies you may need to commit crimes to get multiple modules into the same zipapp or have the zipapp make its own venv and install its own dependencies (each of which probably has a half dozen implementations on pypi) and if you don't want your users to also need python you have entered the cool zone

Nire Bryce @NireBryce6/21/2023, 5:54 AM

I'm giving people a windows python package, I'm already committing a crime

eevee @lexyeevee6/21/2023, 4:11 AM

the people requesting native windows apps are also requesting that i be unable to run them 🙃

Nire Bryce @NireBryce6/21/2023, 5:56 AM

I think most of them doing it in earnest assume the same amount of people can write for 5 platforms (mac, linux/unix, windows, android, iphone) instead of 1.5 (electron/chrome/firefox, safari)

next time I consider a " 'native' app", maybe I will just say WSL+WSLgui is a dependency

qim @queerinmech6/21/2023, 6:13 AM

i know it's hard, i just think that multi billion dollar companies should do it anyway

or design a better native toolkit

Pinned Tags