Uno Platform – Cross Platform .NET UI | Hacker News Reader

Uno Platform – Cross Platform .NET UI

platform.uno

51 pointskristianp12 comments

I never really feel like these can get off the ground because they immediately go too broad. Realistically most cross platform apps will talk to a central API that does most of the logic processing, so really all you are looking for is a way to implement UI that can be re-used.

But I always find that the differences between how we expect a Web App, UWP App and Mobile App to work and behave are too different to really share a UI. Even between Android and iOS, there are paradigms that belong in one but not the other. I feel like you end up writing enough special case code to just handle one platform that it really defeats the purpose.

That being said, the one benefit is being able to write C# on any platform. But is it really that hard that if you want to write a mobile app, to learn Swift?

In my experience, learning a new UI framework is harder than learning a new programming language.

I think that’s the power of react native, it’s in a framework you already sort of know because everything is web, and it’s good enough for teams that can’t dedicate enough resources for native apps.

I work in a Danish municipality. Being a non tech-sector we’re 10 technicians to 5000-7000 employees. Being a C# we looked into Xamarin, Flutter and a few of those things that bundles/parse things, but they’re just really too complicated for the amount of time we can allow ourselves to throw at them. They are also impossible to hire for. We mainly build web-applications though, and while those aren’t always build with JavaScript frameworks (mostly they are just MVC with an Ajax library, which like Uni likely will took years to master). We do make use of modern js frameworks though, and increasingly so. We started out with AngularJS, and got burned hard when it moved to angular 2.0, so we actually ignored them for a while after that. Anyway when we came back and looked at angular/Vue/react it was obvious what benefits we would get from react and react native, and now we’re rather productive with it.

Does Cross Platform here mean only Windows, Web and Mobile or Mac and Linux as well?

The tutorial page lists visual studio as a prerequisite so I'd say only windows. However, the wasm code presumably works with just a framebuffer, so it could likely be ported over without too much difficulty if the windowing/input stuff were taken care of.

I did not see any Linux desktop support.

cross-device I think

The documentation mentions Mac support, but no Linux

How does this compare to Xamarin?

Needs Xamarin for ios and Android development.

"The porting of the Calculator is a very interesting project to work on, and also makes for a very good calculator to use on all platforms,"

I was honestly expecting a website where I could play the card game in various configurations..

Even the title didn’t do anything to disabuse me of that notion.

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