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Comment by Gonzih | Hacker News Reader

Telegram Desktop is very good example of modern desktop client done in the most efficient way. C++ and qt, nothing else. Works like a charm an all major operating systems. Easy to install, use and update. Great stuff.

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I downloaded this and signed up just to give it a try, since I've never used a Qt app on the Mac that didn't fall in the uncanny valley of UI -- trying to be native, but failing.

This doesn't break the trend.

Some problems:

- Text boxes are non-native and do not support any standard keystrokes for navigation (this is huge!)

- The division between the titlebar and the main app body is weird looking

- Highlighting around a focussed text box is weird

- Weird inline dialogs

- No bounce scroll

Some of those are debatable (not everything has to be done using the standard system stuff, of course), but to me the overall effect is very alien.

Slack, for all its inefficiency & handful of annoyances (not actually using unicode / text to represent emoji, anyone?), "feels" like a better Mac citizen than this app.

Mac citizen. Perhaps you should think of your computer as a thing computing things and showing them on the screen. There were many people in history obsessed with uniformity and it usually didn't end well. Yes, uniformity in UI has benefits, but you should appreciate every single deviation from that. In this case, it's the price for "write once, run everywhere", something that isn't appreciated by Apple and Microsoft.

Appreciate something that has no value for you? Why?

You not having value from Telegram means absolutely nothing and is not an argument.

What's your point?

What value deviation from uniform UI has for me?

Is it hurting you in any objective way? That is the better question here. What objective value do you get from a 100% uniform UI? I can very easily orient myself between using my Win10 and macOS Telegram apps.

Aesthetic one, of course.

> There were many people in history obsessed with uniformity and it usually didn't end well.

Right yes. Lets argue against uniformity in the (visual) design of a UI based on pulling in all of known history and the atrocities that have been committed during that time.

Appreciating efficiency seems to be a negative point in HN these days? I can expect that from Facebook but HN? Ouch.

I agree with you. Efficiency should be on the top three priorities list.

Three of your points use the word "weird" which immediately puts them in the subjective category (hint: zero argumentative value). "No bounce scroll" is subjective as well, hence no real argument there as well.

Non-native text boxes is a 50/50 issue. I get that it can be alienating for some and that's just as valid as me not caring. But it's still subjective and bears zero argumentative value as well.

Telegram Desktop works very well and is easily the most lightweight messaging app my Macbook 12" has ever seen. And I don't have to fear that I'll get back to my machine after being away for 25 minutes, only to find it losing 40% battery to Slack and Atom.

Well, clearly you're either not sensitive to or don't care about look-and-feel issues. To those of us that do care, it's a big deal. Just not being able to use C-f, C-b, C-e, C-a &c keyboard shortcuts in text fields is pretty much a deal-breaker for me.

No argument here that Slack is hideously inefficient.

I don't think we're that much different actually.

Aesthetics do matter a lot but they must always take a back seat to efficiency, is what I'm saying.

I'll give them credit where it's due, it's a great app. That being said, if you've read the source, it's not exactly the most approachable thing in the world.

Also, if you're not making your code LGPL/GPL, be prepared to pay $300/person/mo for Qt Creator (seriously - https://www.qt.io/buy-product/)

I think you only need to buy a license if you are linking statically, if you link dynamically to qt then there is no cost.

Except they've rewritten their Mac app in Swift now. So there must be a reason they moved away from that.

They didn't rewrite the app. There are multiple official apps, you could also write your own (that's what is happening for Unigram, an open source UWP client for Telegram)

Probably because Qt apps don't feel like native macOS apps.

telegram-desktop and telegram for mac are different projects

For anyone who interests in looking into the source code: https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop

How do they manage to get the very native feel to the UI on Telegram for MacOS? Or is that a different native client?

Also curious… in what language and UI framework is their iOS client written?

That's a different one.

QT uses native macOS APIs & components in many cases.

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/osx-issues.html

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