| ▲ | sosodev 5 hours ago |
| But there’s still no way to get consistent results cross-platform without a web view, right? I guess Tauri isn’t even consistent because it relies on the system’s browser and they do differ to some degree. |
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| ▲ | tadfisher 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| My friend, inconsistency is the entire point. You now have incredible power to write truly native apps that fit in with the platform and follow all the standards. The bottleneck is now you, or whoever owns each target platform and understands what native apps feel like. |
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| ▲ | sosodev 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | So I’m supposed to maintain a native app for each platform and try to be sure they’re aligned in every way except visuals? Sounds like a recipe for bad UX if anybody uses more than one of them. | | |
| ▲ | Kuyawa 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Not you, your coding agent, for three platforms and at least ten languages If you go Rust all the way all you need is the installer for each platform | | |
| ▲ | rafaelmn 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Agents are pretty shit at making UX decisions unless you're heavily in the training distribution |
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| ▲ | bigstrat2003 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | On the contrary: using a web view is the worst possible UX for your users. It's slow, uses a ton of memory, and doesn't integrate well with the desktop. The only reason people ever did it was laziness, not because it produced a better product. | | |
| ▲ | Rohansi 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'd argue that being slow and using a ton of memory has more to do with (very) poorly optimized websites rather than blaming browsers as a whole. Sure, they'll never be as efficient as native, but people put a lot of work into optimizing browsers and most websites are never optimized. Memory use alone is an interesting case for comparison because websites tend to have a lot more images/videos loaded than other applications. All of those PNGs and JPEGs need to be decompressed before you can paint them to the screen which makes them much larger. | | |
| ▲ | skydhash 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I'd argue that being slow and using a ton of memory has more to do with (very) poorly optimized websites rather than blaming browsers as a whole. A web browser is a huge platform. Audio, 2D and 3D graphics, file handling, network requests,... A lot of code while your application needs are tiny. That is wasteful and a security risk. | | |
| ▲ | Rohansi 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's really only argument against shipping a browser with your application. For ordinary websites (or WebViews) that's not really a concern because it is shared and automatically updated. |
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| ▲ | mort96 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah the problem is having to write 5 apps, not the inconsistency. | | |
| ▲ | mikestew 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If you're writing five apps, you're doing it wrong. A huge amount of probably any app can be contained in a common blob of business logic and wiring, with some native presentation on top. Yes, I oversimplify, but folks have been doing exactly that for decades. More work? Yup, even with a common engine it's more work than firing up Electron. That's where "do we even give a shit about what we're shipping?" comes in. If there's no pride in the finished product, well, Electron isn't going to save your product, either. | | |
| ▲ | dpkirchner 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | IME, the UI library idiosyncrasies are the pieces that take the longest to get right. Common business logic is super simple by comparison. | |
| ▲ | mort96 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > A huge amount of probably any app can be contained in a common blob of business logic and wiring, with some native presentation on top. I keep seeing people claim this, yet most UI software I see really doesn't do anything that complicated. It's some basic database CRUD stuff and some basic algorithms, and then all the actual effort lies in making the UI feel good. |
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| ▲ | skydhash 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Yeah the problem is having to write 5 apps, not the inconsistency. Isn’t that what abstraction and interface is about? You can write the common business logic and presentation concerns, and then share it across each native implementation. That is what web wrapping is in truth, but it’s just inneficient because of the huge surface area of web technologies. | | |
| ▲ | mort96 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | For a whole lot of apps, almost all of the difficult stuff is in making the UI feel right. | | |
| ▲ | skydhash 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Aesthetics, usability, and technical flavor are different axes and feel right is a subjective point. And based on anecdata, usability is what actual users want. Web wrapping is mostly an exclusive focus on aesthetics. With native frameworks, you often get very close to "feel right" without much effort. | | |
| ▲ | Karrot_Kream an hour ago | parent [-] | | > With native frameworks, you often get very close to "feel right" without much effort. I've only seen this sentiment on nerd forums but never among my less technical friends, so I'm a bit reluctant to accept this wisdom honestly. That said, if you're just building something for a technical crowd you'll probably make them much happier if you make your implementation use native widgets and take up much less memory and redraw faster at the expense of a slightly jankier UX. Though, this is probably why IRC clients all feel janky lol. For example a lot of my less technical friends/family really like the visual design of Spotify even though it conflicts with a lot of design language on MacOS, Windows, and Android. |
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| ▲ | agentdev001 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Or my manager... or my stakeholders. Damn you powers that be! |
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| ▲ | masklinn 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > But there’s still no way to get consistent results cross-platform without a web view, right? … good? I want my applications to be consistent with the platform they run on, not with their own stupidity on other platforms. |
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| ▲ | tavavex 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The hidden reason why so many people are frustrated with 'modern design' that goes unaddressed is that most software nowadays completely ignores the standards of the system it runs on. Every single developer of even the most trivial apps insists that their design language is the most important in the room, which is what brings us to the temptation of using a webapp for everything so every user on every OS sees the exact same thing. It's gotten so bad that the only places I see native system UIs from third parties is either older software or hobbyist projects, but never anything corporate. | | |
| ▲ | exmadscientist 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Some of that is also that what "native UI" means has shifted a bit. To look at Windows, Win95 had a thoroughly considered UI design that was very well adapted to both what it needed to do and the hard constraints on it. Win11 is... kind of a shitshow. (Are parts of it still from Windows 3.1? I haven't tried to track them down... but in Win10 there were a few dark corners.) It made sense to match the native UI in the Win95 days. It often doesn't now, it's simply not a target worth hitting. You could just use Win32 and target the older Win95 look, but apart from appearance issues, it was designed to work well in 1995, and we simply demand different things from our UIs now. Like support for touchscreens. Old Win32 apps are painful on touchscreens. (But, often, awesome without a mouse.) And those are real considerations, not oooh-shiny-new-thing designer BS. | | |
| ▲ | tavavex 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, modern Windows design is a bit of a mess, caused by both the designer bug of redesigning everything (we have had at least 3 different Windows design languages prevalent over the last 10 years) and Windows having to support extremely old legacy software. The second was almost nonexistent when Windows 95 was designed, they could have a true clean slate, so the comparison isn't as fair. But still, even with the abundance of native UI frameworks, the point holds true that no new software uses any of them, no matter if it's Win32 or WinUI. They could implement them very easily, and some hobbyist software does so, and it looks very native and in-line with the rest of Windows 11, but they choose not to. And yes, the 3.11 ODBC file selector is still in Windows 11. Praise be to legacy components. |
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| ▲ | ModernMech 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | As a user of both windows and mac operating systems, I'd rather the app be consistent between them so I don't have to adopt a different workflow depending on which OS I'm using the app on. |
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| ▲ | bhaak 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What’s wrong with something like Qt or wxWidgets for native crossplattform GUI frameworks? |
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| ▲ | bryanlarsen 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is consistent results what you want? non-native controls look and behave funny on iOS, and the iOS look on any other platform is annoying. |
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| ▲ | joshheitzman 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Skia is the 2D graphics library used in Chromium. A number of GUI frameworks (Flutter and Avalonia) directly use Skia to do non-native platform GUIs that are consistent across platforms. |
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| ▲ | ogoffart 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| There is also Slint that'd fir perfectly. Others have built game launcher with it as well |
