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Comment by yboris | Hacker News Reader

Thanks to Electron I was able to build an app for Win, Mac, & Linux. Had there not been electron, my app would be only for Windows and no one else.

I strongly suspect I'd never be able to bring the level of polish I could with HTML & CSS to the UI through the standard SDKs -- so the resulting app would be a much worse user experience as well.

The amount of time I'd have to spend learning a new SDK would basically put me off, and I'd likely never have created this app.

Instead I have over 700 people who have purchased my app (~2 purchases per day over the past half year) - https://videohubapp.com/

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Never be able? C'mon, your app is basically one of the Qt samples dude.

Sorry for using "never" -- certainly I could spend a lot more time learning the tricks that could get me close.

But UI is not essential for a functioning app, and if the time costs of building a good UI are too high (a lot of new learning and problem solving) I'll spend less time on it.

What "sample" are you talking about? Is this the kind of thing you're comparing my app to? https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/examples-graphicsview.html

That's a Qt Widget example, you should look at Qt Quick for a way to build more modern-looking interfaces. With Qt Quick user interfaces are described in QML, a declarative markup language, and you can write most (or all, if you want) the business logic in Javascript. See for instance:

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtdoc-demos-photoviewer-example.html

(Edit: by no means I'm saying that your work is trivial to replicate, apologies if this comment came across like that - just wanted to point out that there's more to Qt than Qt Widget.)

Thank you for the direct link. Over the years I've glanced at Qt, I've been discouraged by the amount of work I'd need to do to accomplish even trivial things that I can with HTML.

The original reply I made was to point out that startup costs decrease number of people starting. Unless you know Qt already, your first project will take much longer than using technologies you already know. It's not at all clear how long learning would take.

I know I can climb the mountain, but I'd rather not. This isn't to discourage others from doing it, it's to explain to those who don't understand why many people prefer to stick to Electron.

I think he's referring to this sample (https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtdoc-demos-photoviewer-example.html) - replace Image by VideoPlayer, tweak the ui, make some menus, add a few interactions and you're good to go from what is visible on your screenshots - were I still a freelancer I would maybe have quoted two weeks for that ?

They're dismissing your work as trivial because there's a sample that does the first 1% of what it takes to build, polish, sell, and support an app that people actually use. Same kind of person who thinks all the projects that died in their ~/Code folder are "almost done".

More likely this one: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtmultimedia-multimedia-video-qmlvide...

Simple QML viedo player.

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