• SavvyWolf
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    13011 months ago

    A pile of HTML + JS is the only cross platform GUI toolkit that’s practical to deploy.

    I’m not really happy about it myself, but realistically there’s not any other option than just bundling a website into a wrapper.

    And to pre-empt any replies; your proposed solution must support Windows, Linux (X11 and Wayland), MacOS, iPhone, Android, Chromium and Firefox.

    • @hansl
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      3811 months ago

      Java, of course. /s

        • @hansl
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          2911 months ago

          Real talk; if Java didn’t have their head up their own arses, it would have been the real solution. But Oracle does what Oracle does.

          Do not anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.

    • Carighan Maconar
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      2011 months ago

      And to pre-empt any replies; your proposed solution must support Windows, Linux (X11 and Wayland), MacOS, iPhone, Android, Chromium and Firefox.

      If you are a website, that’s easy, you are actually making the correct choice with Electron insofar that you want a browser.

      If you’re doing an application not a webpage, then we’re walking W+L+Mac+Phones, that’s more tricky. I’m assuming for a second you want a usable UI (otherwise we’d be using Electron again :P ) so we’re talking two applications at least, one for mobile, one for desktop + maybe iPads.

      And then it’s usually already too pricey to bother:

      • Web frontend devs are far cheaper than application developers.
      • Might as well just do a website, runs in everything. Only need to develop once.
      • Updating is immediate with a website, don’t have to do any deployment/upgrade/downgrade plans.
    • @PixxlMan
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      11 months ago

      I think Flutter and Avalonia both tick all those boxes.

        • @PixxlMan
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          611 months ago

          Just checked, and unfortunately no, Wayland is still in preview.

    • @[email protected]
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      911 months ago

      Why is Firefox a ‘platform’? I’m assuming chromium is for chromeOS devices, but I don’t know of any device that just runs Firefox.

      • @[email protected]
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        2011 months ago

        they probably meant web versions of the app that run both on chromium and gecko (firefox) browser engines

      • SavvyWolf
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        611 months ago

        As Communism said, yeah I was ment a web application. No need to spend dev time working on a different version of your app if you can just reuse the web version.

    • meow
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      811 months ago

      If you count browser engines, don’t forget Webkit.

    • @[email protected]
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      311 months ago

      I know the guy working on makepad is trying to solve this problem along with vr headsets, Apple tv, etc. It’s really painful because of dependency bloat messing with build times so he ended up rewriting a bunch of things 🤷‍♂️.

    • @replicat
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      111 months ago

      JUCE is weirdly capable of non-audio related UIs and runs on all these platforms.