Must we wreck all the high quality GUIs we had and replace them with non-standardized, ugly and bloated Electron garbage?
This would be a much better use for Qt than Electron. But I guess that's not hip enough anymore.
This would be a much better use for Qt than Electron. But I guess that's not hip enough anymore.
One of the reasons I love Filezilla is because it feels like I am working right inside Windows shell / explorer.exe.
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", "There's no accounting for taste", and all that. I'm not a fan of the style that was used (too much blank space, flat UI elements, gives the vibe of a webpage instead of an application that you can do something in, having both a hamburger menu and dropdown menus seems weird), but "garbage" is needlessly harsh.
It's useful to be reminded that software development is a process of continuous learning, and that's what this project represents anyhow: Learning a new platform by tying some libraries together into something that's functional and that demonstrates what the developer was trying to learn.
This app it is kind of overkill, though.
That's a ridiculous statement. Web UIs are pretty awful, unpredictable, confusing and non-standard compared to desktop ones. Not only that but they're hard to develop, you have to jump through hoops of CSS hacks to make things behave in a sort-of-desktop-like fashion.
There are many high quality graphing libraries available on desktop apps (Qwt, QCustomPlot, DevExpress to name a few I've worked with).
The training thing you talk about is true though, if your team has more experience on the web, then retraining them is wasted effort I suppose. Depends on your idea of quality result though.
I disagree almost completely with this. I haven't had to use a CSS "hack" in ages. And I think the "hard to develop" part is a product of experience. Having been in the web world for a while I find no difficult in it at all. Especially when using one of the many CSS frameworks out there.
Although I will give you that on second read, my statement is a bit ridiculous because I said "tools" and desktop does have better drag and drop tools for UI. What I should have said is "capabilities"
Was there something that can be done on the desktop you had in mind that is particular difficult in web?
Such as?
Doing native UIs since MS-DOS and Amiga, with enough web experience not to see how it is better than the RAD tooling of the 90's or declarative UIs like XAML.
Where is Blend for web UIs or Delphi style app development?
Having developed in all of those (Borland C++ Builder which is the same as Delphi except not OO Pascal, QT, and web)...
The amount of power CSS gives you over the precise look of the app at different aspect ratios gives an awesome amount of control over what the app looks like on any screen size.
Also, things like wrapping of elements from one line to another work very well in CSS/HTML, especially when dealing with interactive rich text. For example, in some UI libraries (iOS comes to mind) making a line of text with a clickable image inside of it that wraps when the text gets too long is frustratingly difficult but in HTML it is a piece of cake.
With that said, the rich text editing choses for web are much easier to work with and more robust (IMHO) than the desktop equivalents.
Not to mention OpenGL rendering, vector graphics, loading of assets from the network are all built-in. All of which can certainly be done from a desktop environment but the tools to do so are not as mature.
.NET makes a lot of strides in this direction. But if you're going to include the .NET runtime with your distribution it will be almost as large as Electron apps.
Then there are animations which are easy in web technologies. And which UX designers are starting to realize is an important aspect of good user experiences.
Can all of this be done in QT? Absolutely. But all of it is out-of-the-box with web.
As far as the RAD tools from the 90s? Not even close. Albeit Blend is nice. But tools like that do exist for web, just not for desktop UI. I'm sure if web tech becomes more common in desktop UI the tools will come.
Or playing with CSS magic trying to figure out the incantation that will make it hardware accelerate the GUI in a portable way across all browsers?
Web animations are a poor cousin of native animation engines like iOS, Android,UWP, MacOS, JavaFX.
Electron was already done in 90's and it didn't take the world, it was called MSHTML.
So what wonderful tool for web development does match Blend?
I don't use FTP frequently - I just needed something basically to upload/download files.
After switching to windows, I couldn't find any decent FTP clients I liked. I tried Filezilla, Winscp, Cyberduck. They're all too busy and look like they're straight from XP... so I made this.
I guess I'm just not sure what you're talking about when you say "High Quality GUIs" when talking about Windows FTP clients specifically.