What Features Should A GUI toolkit have?

Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Fri Mar 6 06:22:20 PST 2015


On Friday, 6 March 2015 at 13:22:47 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Friday, 6 March 2015 at 12:29:46 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> to!). Frankly speaking, I hate JS and wish there was a way to 
>> get rid of it (please, don't try to convince me that JS is 
>> somehow good - it isn't - and that there is jquery and blah 
>> dee blah. Please don't.).
>
> It isn't good, but once you figured out what to avoid, you can 
> use a subset of it pretty well. Like C++ and D ;^)
>
> It feels weird to type "Object.create(null)" to get a 
> dictionary-like object, but it will probably be fixed in 
> ECMAScript 6?
>
>> worry about any platform specific quirks or pitfalls. 
>> Something that is only a thin layer that is agnostic to the 
>> logic, the data processing that goes on in the app. 
>> Unfortunately, the only way to do this today is HTML5+JS (it's 
>> the JS bit that annoys me).
>
> Yeah, but I think if you only do the GUI (the View part of MVC) 
> in JS using shadow dom it should be quite ok. And nothing 
> should prevent one from generating the JS bindings from D to 
> JS/HTML5 from D code.
>
>> Using technologies (other than HTML5) that interface to native 
>> widgets, is not maintainable, you're always one step behind.
>
> I agree. The alternative is to develop only for a few markets 
> (e.g. iOS/Cocoa). People are also quite used to the common UI 
> paradigms used on the web by now, so "learnability" is not the 
> same as in the 80s/90s where regular users would be terribly 
> confused when encountering innovative UI components. Text books 
> on usability probably lags a bit behind there...

Except the browser only offers a 80s/90s view of the desktop.

No way of providing an immersive experience with all the UI 
features the native platforms expose to their applications.

I lost count how many times I had to explain that the feature X, 
that the customers like so much in a given native application, is 
not possible in their new web based UI.

Last one was an upload progress bar with status with amount of 
uploaded data for files dragged into the browser, working the 
same way across all required browsers.

>
> Qt et al might work in markets where there is little 
> competition (low volume narrow markets), but I have trouble 
> seeing a future for it without a major player backing it 100% 
> to gain market share.
>
> I believe Google depends on HTML5 domination to keep 
> Apple/Microsoft from getting "too big".

They have Android for that.

ChromeOS might sell well in Amazon US, but I never saw one in my 
travels around Europe, except for the ones at German Saturn shops 
bundled with every type of promotion to try to get them out of 
the shop, with decreasing prices every time I come by.

--
Paulo



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