GUI libraries

[Xavier Bigand]

Le 29/11/2013 03:00, Chris Cain a écrit :
> 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.
+1

For my work I work on a huge application that was actually only 
available on iOS, with his interface wrote in cocoa. The next version 
will be ported to iOS, Android, Windows and Mac OS X (maybe linux), so 
we completely rewrite the interface with QML, because to increase the 
application identity over multiple platforms and provide something 
really easy to use for customers. Providing an UI that match to mobile 
ones will remove the apprehension of users instead of Widgets making the 
application looks like a professional tool.

I also think that professionals want beautiful apps too, just take a 
look to Visual, less and less developers want use vim or emacs.

A lot of progress have to be done on UI and I don't think that it will 
necessary impulse by OS developers.