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Comment by fauigerzigerk | Hacker News Reader

>Though Flutter doesn’t use the native UI widgets, it’s a cross-platform framework and has widgets for both Android and iOS. [...] On iOS, the biggest thing that stuck out to me was the scrolling. It didn’t quite feel right because of the physics, but I’m sure that would just require a little tweaking by the Flutter team.

Count me a skeptic. This is the same approach taken by Java's Swing (now JavaFX) toolkit and apparently it has exactly the same issues. Swing never felt quite right even after decades of tweaking.

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AFAIK, Qt also uses the same approach (it does not use native widgets), yet it does not get the same bad reviews like Swing & JavaFX.

On the opposite, I think people generally like it.

I wonder why?

Perhaps because Qt occupies a couple of niches that don't have a particularly entrenched native look and feel or are not very widely used.

Home entertainment systems, in-vehicle entertainment systems, kiosks, medical devices, avionics, Linux desktop apps, printer displays, navigation systems, industrial equipment controls, these are the sort of things that Qt is mostly used for.

Do you use a Qt desktop or mobile app on a day to day basis? The only Qt app I have ever used is QtCreator. It's a good development environment, but the look and feel is definitely a bit weird.

I have not used Qt, which is why I'm asking (but I've used Swing in the past)

Microsoft also did that in WPF.

For Windows PCs, it was already a widely used native look and feel. Also wide selection of native Win32 controls, mostly implemented in ComCtl32.dll.

Yet in WPF I can easily replicate native look and feels, if I want so.

That's because WPF like winforms used native windows controls under the hood. Calls would be marshaled via pinvoke.

While interop is indeed available if you need to consume a Win32 control (not without limitations but generally works), by default WPF doesn’t use native controls. Instead it paints stuff on GPU with Direct3D 9, and on top of that implements its own markup, styling, layout, animation, behaviors, composition, etc…

Thanks - I haven't touched windows desktop UI since GDI was the mechanism for drawing.

Simplest way to verify, launch visual studio 2015, press Tools/Spy++, in Spy++ find the visual studio’s main window, you’ll see that Win32 thinks visual studio is a single window with no children, with class starting with “HwndWrapper[DefaultDomain;”

Unlike that, Spy++ itself uses Win32 (wrapped by MFC but it doesn’t matter) for GUI, you’ll see these SysTreeView32, msctls_statusbar32 and other native controls there.

I stand corrected - thank you. I don't have a windows machine anymore but as you said spy++ can tell you all you need to know. Hilarious to still see hungarian (hwnd - handle to a window).

Don't you use vlc?

No I don't.

I always liked wxWidgets for that, and other people MFC, but where wxWidgets failed for me was a simple text area editor, which underneath was sending messages to the Windows Control, and in order to retrieve the current line, it had to scan through the whole text buffer over and over... "Leaky abstraction"...

I also was "worried" (more than need to) - how people with disabilities, or special devices (non-standard pointer devices, like artists) would use Qt, as I thought there is no native support.

And yet, I was mistaken. Windows (and other systems) expose an "assistive" layer where you can explain to the underlying windowing system what is each thing that you draw, the text, etc. And Qt solved it.

Once we moved from MFC -> Qt, and removed other uses of wxWidgets, non-ui programmers started adding bits and pieces much easier in Qt (I'm not claiming Qt superiority), because all it took sometimes was to subclass, and repaint something, add button or two and create new control. With MFC that was hard, and with wxWidgets kind of tricky (solutions always ended up being "Windows" specific, not that we cared about Linux/OSX back then).

So that's why I love flutter, and it reminds of Unreal's internal UI used by it's editor.

At work I'm still struggling with GWT, XML ui binder files, and trying to componentize modules. With flutter, Qt, and I guess Unreal's UI it's much easier. Or with JUCE for that matter...

So I'm no longer against "custom" drawn UIs, as long as they expose their contents properly to the OS (and if this matters really).

Sorry for the long rant...

Oh, and I mentioned it someplace else - I love how IntelliJ uses Swing - it's much better from Eclipse (which is trying the exact opposite with it's own platform-"wrapping" ui-kit)... And just 10+ years ago I thought the opposite.

I love how IntelliJ uses it :)

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