Depends what you mean by "look good".

The main function of the app being discussed here is to draw solid black rectangles on the screen.

Don't forget the "average person", I'm assuming someone relying on software as a tool, doesn't care about the stuff "designers" seem to obsess over, and will actively hate if you break their workflow by doing things like adding useless padding that makes them scroll more or shows less information in the name of "modernity". There's a lot of specialized niche software for various industries, often very expensive too, which looks like it came out in the early 90s. As long as it works well, users won't complain.

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an hour ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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lelandfe an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There's a pretty simple settings window: https://github.com/domenic/display-blackout?tab=readme-ov-fi...

Would that UI be hard to accomplish?

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bloomca an hour ago | parent [-]

You mean conceptually or to match it? Native components are pretty much impossible to match without actually using the native framework which provides them, so you need WinUI/WPF.

Win32 provides its own components which are basically Win95 style apps, and you can draw the components using some graphics APIs by yourself.

The whole native development area is a mess exactly because making your own (decent) renderer is a huge undertaking.

	▲	Onavo 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		But you are making false equivalence, the Win32 GUI API is decades out of date from modern UIs. I can use flutter and make a pixel perfect equivalent of the above UI in an hour, with the exact same responsiveness behavior on both windows tablets and desktop, and scales perfectly in high DPI displays. 3 hours if you want the toggle animation timing to be exactly the same. I came from the WinForms world so don't pretend I don't understand Win32 programming. The fault lies with Microsoft for not investing in it more.