Interesting. I think we really need a good cross-platform GUI development story. I wonder if Flutter will turn out to be it.
Does anyone know how Flutter fares when it comes to accessibility?
Does anyone know how Flutter fares when it comes to accessibility?
I think the Flutter team takes accessibility quite seriously; https://flutter.io/docs/development/accessibility-and-locali...
EditTexts feel different, but as a user I don't see much difference..
Great job! and props to you for making it open source
I think the web GUI stack is the only viable solution, but it can't be electron because of the redundant bulk--it will have to be something like ChromeOS: every program's GUI runs in its own "tab" (except tabs are laid out like windows); however, instead of pulling HTML/CSS/JS from remote servers, the servers would run as local daemons (it wouldn't really matter where the servers ran, to be honest; network transparency and all that).
I don't know how you get that. GTK needs more work, but Qt is spot on.
This is my opinion as a former Qt developer who dabbled in GTK in my spare time. Qt is all written in 90's C++ with all of the garbage that entails--awful memory management, CMake as a build system, no widely used package manager, shitty tools, etc. It's actually _worse_ than 90's C++ because it depends on a convoluted soup of preprocessor macros and a metaobject compiler in order to bolt onto C++ things like a dynamic type system and reflection. This means there's only one IDE that really understands it, and it was really buggy when I last used it (~2014). The one nice thing about Qt is QML, which is only nice to the extent that it removes or papers over the aforemetioned list of shitty Qt characteristics.
And GTK is strictly worse than Qt.
For all its issues, web development is nowhere near this bad--it's cheaper and easier for an organization to ship a bastardized browser alongside their web app than to build a Qt app.
I think a lot of this stems from the fact that Linux (or BSD for that matter) don't really have a "native" toolkit.
Also, I think people overestimate the importance of using native widgets. Anecdotally I would say that only about half of the apps I use on a daily basis actually utilize the native toolkit. Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader, IntelliJ IDEA/Android Studio, Visual Studio Code, Chrome, and Firefox are great examples of very successful software that are not built using the native toolkit.
On Linux too, the toolkits of a handful of the applications I use are also, shall we say, "home made".
In fact, widgets in Windows have been theme-able since XP. Why couldn't that have been made more available?
There's just no way that any generic widget set is going to 100% fill the needs of an easy-to-use, complicated GUI application. Nowadays when UI/UX actually matters in the success of software, it makes sense that developers are taking control of their UI's widgets. Cobbling together a GUI with a limited set of cookie-cutter widgets that are difficult to modify is no longer acceptable.
It's really not that bad but the world seems to ignore it.
No, and most of them are crap like Electron.
I believe one of the Dev sprints before 1.0 focused primarily on accessibility and there is a label widget that can wrap any widget to provide a name for screen readers.