GUI libraries

[Chris]

On Friday, 29 November 2013 at 02:00:50 UTC, Chris Cain wrote:
> On Friday, 29 November 2013 at 01:44:34 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>> Still lacking proper beard ;)
>
> A programmer without a beard! Blasphemy! Witch!
>
> ----
>
> 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.

You actually put into words what I've been thinking. I know that 
people want "native behavior", and maybe one day it will just be 
"intuitive behavior" instead of "corporate OS behavior".[1] But 
with D we have a chance to do what you say in the last paragraph.

[1] What we expect of a UI is what we've been made to believe to 
expect. It all boils down to "Architect or Bee?"