What Features Should A GUI toolkit have?

Chris via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Fri Mar 6 08:17:04 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.

Yeah, has any further work been done on JS-D bindings? I remember 
there have been little projects here and there ...

>> 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...

True. Users are more willing to use different UIs these days, I 
guess because most homepages are little apps with a UI. Although 
there are still a few Windows-dinosaurs who go mental, if they 
don't find the "Start" menu in the left corner at the bottom of 
the screen. :)

I like the freedom HTML5 gives you (although CSS can be quite 
annoying sometimes). It's like a blank page. Native framworks are 
too prescriptive.

> 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.

That's why I'm still sceptical of it. Whether it's worth the 
trouble.

> I believe Google depends on HTML5 domination to keep 
> Apple/Microsoft from getting "too big".

When introducing the iPad, Apple put its money on HTML5/JS to 
fight against Flash. I think everything is going in the direction 
of HTML5, which is understandable given the wide support it has 
and the myriad of different platforms. And Google, being an 
internet company, is of course a big proponent of HTML-based 
technologies.

>> technologies win in this respect. And users don't care what's 
>> under the hood. They simply ask "Can I download an app?". If 
>> they can't, they are very annoyed.
>
> Yep, and businesses ask for features they wanted last week. So 
> time to market matters ("can you deliver this new feature 
> within 2-4 weeks?").

And the app is just a HTML widget, ha! But who cares once the 
user is happy.


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