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Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

I hate the slowness and bloat and entire ideology behind electron, BUT...electron apps do a pretty decent job of feeling native on the platform. Something I've never seen a Qt app do.

Would love a counter-example, if you've got one. I'm on a mac.

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I can't think of a Qt app that looked odd on macOS. I've developed quite a few pieces of software in Qt for the mac, and they all perfectly use the OS's styles and colors.

Is any of the software publically available? I will critique it.

I know Viber is written in QT, it does not look native on macOS.

What Electron applications feel native on any platform? I use Discord and it feels and looks like a web-page, not a Windows application.

interestingly, it looks and feels like an electron web-page. They're all following their own little paradigm now..

I feel like slack is decent. It definitely feels like a webpage, but the embedded UI elements are good -- the text boxes support all the MacOS shortcuts, you can insert special characters using the character viewer, text selection works properly, the menus aren't weird.

I guess maybe I'm just so used to web stuff now that that codes as "native enough" to me?

It's only a problem on Mac.

Windows native apps all look different anyway and Qt is native on Linux.

I wouldn't know, dont have a mac. But VLC is my best guess at polished software that should look good on mac. If it doesnt... ;/

I don't think VLC is using Qt!

Yessss it is. The gui is written in Qt c++ and all the processing backend is C.

https://github.com/videolan/vlc/tree/master/modules/gui/qt

Only for nix -- for the Mac, it's using native widgets, if I'm not mistaken:

https://github.com/videolan/vlc/tree/master/modules/gui/maco...

(Which is pretty damning -- they already had a Qt implementation, but would rather do real native!)

Ouch. Mac for Qt is definitely the weakest point. Theres some experimental work being done to allow developers to wrap native Mac controls. http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/02/06/native-look-feel/

This would help a lot, I think. Still a going concern, or a dormant experiment?

Its targeted for Qt6, which is not coming anytime soon, but it gives me hope that Qt always has smart options to move on.

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