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Comment by cdr | Hacker News Reader

A webapp is not a replacement for a desktop app. There are very legitimate reasons for wanting a desktop app, more for some types of apps than others.

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webapp vs native, do users really care about the technology as long as you can make them happy?

The approach we took is native for mobile and webapp for everything else.

Our users are asking for a "desktop app", so we are looking at wrapping our webapp in a SSB and distributing that.

I'm somehow not familiar with any of the apps he's referencing. Is he talking about mobile apps or desktop?

desktop

I see, thanks. My comment above doesn't apply, then. However, I think you can get very nice-looking, cross-platform, native apps with python and QT, GTK or other toolkits.

Qt for the win!

Examples? I've seen okay looking GTK and QT apps running under a specific OS or distribution, but usually when you try to run them on a different OS they fall apart.

I wrote a small mail notifier a while ago, it displayed fine on Linux with minimal changes. I don't have any other examples handy, though, sorry...

Qt supports different native styles, Qt looks - and behaves - native in Windows, OS X, GNOME, KDE, ... Try QtCreator for example, or VLC, or VirtualBox, or any other application made in Qt.

Check out their whitepaper "Qt Cross-Platform Application Framework": http://qt.nokia.com/files/pdf/qt-4.4-whitepaper

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