ah the GUI designers from Borland, light years ahead of everything else... it just worked and looked nice (compared to Microsoft shitshow that was Visual Studio back then), was very easy to learn and its the only thing in software I've seen in 20 years which deserved the title RAD.

Delphi cut the corners with their fixed positioning. It will not work for web and it works very poorly for localization (labels change their lengths and can overlap over each other).

As soon as you introduce layouts to your UI, all the Delphi simplicity goes out of the window.

This is an interesting challenge to invent a way for UI to be pixel-fixed, yet work in web and with localization. If someone would do that, you could rebuild Delphi for web.

I guess one way is to build a pixel-fixed form for English language and let AI to build a layout for this form.

We had things like expandable container groups for UI controls that could auto-resize the child controls as necessary to fit their content back in the 90s.

Granted, it wasn't as easy to set up properly vs modern web layout engines - but there is so much more to RAD applications than the UI layout by itself.

So? Many apps don’t need localisation. Responsive UIs weren’t all that important in the mid 1990s when monitors and their resolutions were all in a relatively small corridor. I remember 20 inch CRTs to be the absolute high-end that few could afford. Most PCs came with 14 or 15 inch monitors, 17 inch later.

Totally agreed. I have done both a lot of work with the Borland tools and over the years with various web based libraries and languages, Borland wins hands down, in spite of the underlying horrible mess.

This. How easy was it to put together a well-functioning Windows desktop app in Delphi, compared with the complexity of developing a Web app these days?

I love using these RAD tools but I think part of what we're forgetting is how much lower the standards were (both visual and functional) for UIs back then. Sure you could throw together a professional UI in a lot less time, but part of that was that the definition of "professional" was "looks exactly the same as every other Windows application and uses the same 5 form elements". We've just come to expect more variety so the RAD approach doesn't take you as far these days.

> I love using these RAD tools but I think part of what we're forgetting is how much lower the standards were (both visual and functional) for UIs back then.

They weren't lower then, they're lower now.

> Sure you could throw together a professional UI in a lot less time, but part of that was that the definition of "professional" was "looks exactly the same as every other Windows application and uses the same 5 form elements".

Yup. That's still the correct definition.

> We've just come to expect more variety so the RAD approach doesn't take you as far these days.

Yes, unfortunately users have been conditioned to expect myriad variations of something like Kai's Fucking "Power Tools". And most of them have even been deluded into thinking of that as a good thing. They're wrong.

Yeah they tend to have no variable window size support.

What??? WTF are you talking about?

i think it's probably coming back with this whole low-code/no-code thing.