Re:9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
by epcoa on Friday January 05, 2024 @02:20PM
(#38883425)
“ feature gaps between platforms, making their feature set a union of features”
This fundamentally doesn’t work for UI/UX. You have to pick a paradigm and implementation details at some point and the high level UX design of Windows UI dejure and Mac are just different, in ways that cannot be factored out of a framework without leaky abstractions.
Your choices are: the Qt/Tk/Swing approach write once, a solid if dated UX that is themeable but not truly native anywhere, the web app (or its QML/Flutter/FX equiv), wxwidgets etal which sort of tried to be native everywhere last century and looks and works that way, or at least two parallel independent native UI implementations which is a gargantuan more effort.
Or go whole hog with FLTK or your own custom thing. a11y? WTF is that?
“ Instead they typically take a least common denominator approach, limiting apps written with them to only the most common basic features.”
I wouldn’t call wxwidgets basic, but it is a mess. It can’t be any other way. If it could someone would have made it in the last 30 years.
Just because you use Cocoa/AppKit rather than drawing on a canvas does not magically make your app feel like a Mac app.
Literally 100s of side projects have started down this path. People eventually learn you can’t abstract everything away, at least not the labor intensive part.
This fundamentally doesn’t work for UI/UX. You have to pick a paradigm and implementation details at some point and the high level UX design of Windows UI dejure and Mac are just different, in ways that cannot be factored out of a framework without leaky abstractions.
Your choices are: the Qt/Tk/Swing approach write once, a solid if dated UX that is themeable but not truly native anywhere, the web app (or its QML/Flutter/FX equiv), wxwidgets etal which sort of tried to be native everywhere last century and looks and works that way, or at least two parallel independent native UI implementations which is a gargantuan more effort.
Or go whole hog with FLTK or your own custom thing. a11y? WTF is that?
“ Instead they typically take a least common denominator approach, limiting apps written with them to only the most common basic features.”
I wouldn’t call wxwidgets basic, but it is a mess. It can’t be any other way. If it could someone would have made it in the last 30 years.
Just because you use Cocoa/AppKit rather than drawing on a canvas does not magically make your app feel like a Mac app.
Literally 100s of side projects have started down this path. People eventually learn you can’t abstract everything away, at least not the labor intensive part.