The State of the GUI

[aberba]

On Wednesday, 24 October 2018 at 06:20:05 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
>
> At this point in time HTML/CSS/JS is by far the most prevalent 
> UX toolkit in use today and not a single modern website uses 
> the native widget theme. The bare minimum is Bootstrap.
>
> In terms of the usage of publicly available software to sample 
> the HTML stack is utilized more than all other stacks combined. 
> Next up is mobile apps, but even here usage of the default 
> theme is in the trivial minority, the vast majority of mobile 
> apps use themes that closely match the websites they are 
> derived from.
>
> I firmly believe that a non-native, cross-platform, UX library 
> will open D up to a whole new market of users that are 
> desperate for something better than what they have now.

I believe most people in this community are not designers 
primarily so this might not seem like a "very worth it" goal to 
reach. But its clearly obvious to me...cus I've been doing web 
development and used GTK+ and some native GUI tookits for 
development...I use Linux a s my primary desktop. I also fairly 
know about how Android's UI works. Its clear that all new and 
most used GUI tookits are those that allow customization and 
abstract low-level details across platforms. Native tookit works 
really well when targeting a single platform which D already has 
a couple.

> I think this is a key point. The theme itself is now part of a 
> brand and using the native toolkit would be a branding 
> disaster. American Express, Facebook, or Google aren't in the 
> business of showcasing Microsoft's, GNOME's, or Apple's 
> branding, they want their apps to showcase their own brands.

I couldn't agree more. When you look at apps in Play Store or 
Apple's app store (Mac & iOS), you'll see the most popular apps 
are those designed and themed to look nice CROSS PLATFORM (for 
them most part). The thing with native toolkits is each platform 
is designed to look and work differently...you find yourself 
implementing hacks...lots of work...and what happens when OS 
vendor stop developing it like Window's often does for the new 
thing.


> And none of this is even counting the tooling ecosystem that 
> would be recreate from scratch. Qt has QML, WPF and UWP have 
> different flavors of XAML. There are special pre-compilers. The 
> list goes on. So when individual sets out to bind a UX toolkit 
> they inevitably flame-out because the amount of effort required 
> to get something simple working is enormous.

That doesn't really matter much IMO. Most of these toolkits have 
such layout languages but they are not often used much beyound 
some niches...but its worth it though. The most important part is 
a well designed and simplistic APIs...and something like being 
able to customize UI elements/nodes with something like a subset 
of CSS...which GTK+ does really well. See elementary OS 
(elementary.io) for how beautiful GTK+ can be themed/customized.  
Anther is Using SVG for icons and graphics by DEFAULT to simplify 
things...like scaling.


It's about time we settle down and talk about a solid, written in 
D GUI toolkit that is modern. Something that will compel mass 
adoption of D to build native apps...where it makes sense. At 
least, native apps are still relevant today...even for those of 
us doing more web apps.