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Comment by boondaburrah | Hacker News Reader

There is that most desktop UI frameworks don't appear to be built with programmatic creation in mind. Most webdev I've done involved a text editor to make my UI, while native (debatable, it's been Qt, Java Swing, WinForms, and waaay back when HyperCard) almost always involved a UI designer that would make hooks I could write plumbing code for. I definitely prefer desktop dev with a UI designer over webdev any day, but the webdev API (if I have to use an API to create my UI) is generally better.

I'd never write desktop UI toolkit code by hand. I tried with Java Swing and it sucked, and the one time I was forced to use Qt Quick via code it was just JSON/JS anyway.

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Yes, I'm _IMPRESSED_ by the lousy state of modern "ui" design tools for web.. It's still 1970 in web land.. having to use a text editor and not one, not two but THREE different syntaxes and languages (at least) to produce a working web user interface..

Even in early 90s we had excellent (amazingly excellent +++ compared to web) desktop gui design tools, that were easy drag and drop things..

10 year old me made his first windows executable with a gui and buttons on his windows 95 machine..

What do you want to see happen? Macromedia Dreamweaver? That's actually a great example of bloatware that we managed to roll back. It was an excellent piece of software, but it was only useful if you believed that your website needed to be bloated with ten layers of nested tables in order to be socially acceptable, since back then everyone wanted to be a "portal" that looked like the Yahoo home page. Then Google came along with their nearly empty homepage like a blinding ray of sunshine with a razor sharp focus on the things people actually wanted, and it redefined the aesthetics of prestige. Web bloat stopped being associated with professionalism and simple became trendy.

So I don't think the struggle against bloatware is hopeless. We have the tools now to create and easily distribute many forms of conventional software without the cosmetic complexity. One morning we could wake to see trendsetters using it and things will change.

You're making my point for me.

Native applications.

That, or an entirely new approach to application platform than the HTML+CSS+JS/wasm abomination that we have today, an api and underlying platform that is actually built for making graphical user interfaces for interactive computer programs, rather than glorified newspaper pages.

I want a platform that allows for the creation of tools that are easy and convenient to use to create nice looking, performant, unbloated UI, tools like the winforms designer or JFormDesigner or qt designer or glade.. What do they have in common ? They produce fairly unbloated code for their target language/platform, are nice and convenient to use and are not able to generate good html/css/js output.

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