GUI libraries

[Chris Cain]

On Friday, 29 November 2013 at 01:44:34 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> Still lacking proper beard ;)

A programmer without a beard! Blasphemy! Witch!

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But anyway, going along with what you guys are saying, if you've 
ever seen reviews on Android apps, a lot of apps get lots of bad 
reviews for not adhering to the Android design standards. Using 
cross-platform toolkits are usually a death sentence for your 
rating. So, there's a lot to be said about making sure your app 
looks consistent in the OS it's running in.

Some apps do "get away" with something that is somewhat custom. 
Take, for instance, Steam on Windows. It doesn't look like a 
"proper" Windows application, but it works very well for it 
regardless. That said, Steam on Mac is terrible because it feels 
too much like a windows app there (mainly in regards to scrolling 
behavior).

That all said, if I were writing a GUI app in D right now, I 
would probably write my own toolkit and make something super 
simple (but "good" looking) to test out some new ideas. I think 
we really need an easy, straight-forward, and powerful UI toolkit 
that takes advantage of D's unique features (such as compile-time 
specialization, maybe using DSLs that compiled & used at 
compile-time instead of runtime) while reflecting well in 
comparison to the newest paradigms of application design (think 
how Android & iOS apps are made and maybe even a bit of web 
design). I can't quite precisely quantify what we need, but I 
think a fresh approach to the UI programming interface could set 
D apart in this area.

Simply using a translation of an old UI toolkit is "easy" but 
will not make UI applications pleasing to develop.