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?

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Vedor 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not sure about Unity, bot Godot is already used to build tools, like Pixelorama (pixel art graphics editor, a bit akin to Asesprite), RPG In A Box (game engine targeted for RPG games), Bitmapflow (tool to generate in-between animation frames), and probably more I don't know about.

Well, if I remember correctly, the Godot editor is written in Godot.

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Supermancho 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Godot is written in C++ It may have some GDScript in there, but I don't think so. The sourcecode is available: https://github.com/godotengine/godot

	▲	hofrogs 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The C++ code there (at least in the editor directory) initializes and configures godot ui components that the editor is made of

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v9v 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think Godot is a possible contender as well. There are a few non-game applications made with it, and they've recently added a docs page tailored to non-game application development: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/ui/creating...

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criddell 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What's the accessibility story like? Do Unity applications work well with screen readers?

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fsloth 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure but different target market.

CRUD apps are non-trivial.

If Unity were to ship platform native replacement for WPF equivalent (hell or even winforms) it would become a really enticing app development platform.

	▲	flohofwoe 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> CRUD apps are non-trivial. Aren't these pretty much the most trivial UI apps possible? E.g. compared to other native apps like Photoshop, Blender, Visual Studio or Office, CRUD is mostly just about banging together custom UI frontend for a database. Unity's editor is implemented in its own (old) UI system, same with Godot, so in both engines it's possible to create 'traditional' non-game UI applications.

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pier25 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Flutter is probably better suited for apps

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irishcoffee 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just use Qt. Native, cross-platform, works like a champ.

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NetMageSCW 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Cross-platform and native never works well.

	▲	hermitcrab an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Nothing is perfect, but it works well in my experience.
	▲	irishcoffee an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You’ve never used Qt

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moron4hire 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Unity's 2D UI stuff is very poorly designed, with lots of edge cases where auto-calculated fields can hit a divide-by-zero issue and then become unrecoverable because the value is now NaN which can't be auto-calculated back to a number.

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jordand 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Unity has a big runtime that needs to be bundled with it to run

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netbioserror 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Speaking from personal experience, Godot has the sneakiest potential. It has all the UI components and flexible layout containers you could ask for, a signaling system that lets you put the methods from less relevant components in the scripts for more relevant ones (making for a more compact project), and you can also manually compile slim template builds for cleaner distribution. There's a future there.

	▲	hofrogs 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There are already tools made in Godot, including the godot editor itself. This page has some of them: https://gamefromscratch.com/godot-developed-non-game-applica...
	▲	tomcam 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What’s the story for accessibility and non-LTR text boxes?