this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Programming
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Well… this is pretty crappy.
I built a Xamarin app (mac/iOS) because I wanted portability to windows. Then I was forced to upgrade to .net 6/7 because of a library I needed, and that meant upgrading to .Net for Mac/.Net for iOS (which is part of MAUI, but not using MAUI UI controls). MAUI is definitely undercooked at the moment.
What an awful and painful process, but I’m finally there… and they drop the main IDE for development. Damn.
VSCode doesn’t have a visual UI designer (well… neither does VSMac, but it does prepare a copy of your project and opens XCode for editing the storyboard/images, and copies changes back). So does this mean they will add that to VSCode? Or will we all have to switch to raw edits of XML to create UIs like you have to do with MAUI? Ick.
Developing GUIs for windows using MS tools is a lesson in frustration, especially when you want to have cross platform capabilities… WPF -> WinForms -> Xamarin -> Xamarin.Forms -> MAUI/.Net for {Mac,iOS}… Not to mention UWP… Each transition is a rewrite. Damn.
@wth @Spyros We need one universal graphical tool kit that works everywhere!
GTK: Hi, I heard you're looking fo—
Me: NOT YOU
ROFL.
True on desktop OSs. I did quite a bit of commercial dev on GTK many years ago, but I always found the look and feel on Mac (esp) and windows quite klunky. I hear that quite a bit of work has been done on native theming, so perhaps my impressions are out of date. Having said that - GTK wasn’t bad to work with. I also did a project in WxWidgets, but again desktop only. It was not too bad for simple apps.
For the current app - first release target was iOS, then Mac, Android, Windows then Linux. So GTK was out since its not mobile friendly (I have heard you can do something on Android, but iOS is out).
@wth I have worked with GTK3 myself, and once I got used to its quirks, actually found it quite nice to work with. I was writing my code in Python too, which added some extra challenge, but the GObject introspection took a lot of the pain out of interoperating with what's basically a C library.
However, I'm aware that GTK has a bit of a reputation. The look and feel is great on Linux desktops that use it natively, but I do remember it looking pretty ugly cross-platform.
(tagging @programming for Mastodon→Lemmy federation – ignore this comment)
GTK has improved a lot, but native theming isn’t the area. It has very powerful theming but I don’t think a macOS theme exists.
Thanks. I’m very out of date with it.