Ask HN: What desktop GUI app have you created or are creating? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What desktop GUI app have you created or are creating?

4 pointsfuzztester6 comments

Please talk about the app's purpose, tech stack, and anything else you would like to share about creating it.

I'm working on a custom Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) for my lab. We have a hyper specialized image capture and processing pipeline so I wanted to develop a system that's molded to that. It's mostly MATLAB, but I've sprinkled in a little Python for metadata extraction purposes.

Sounds interesting.

Have you seen Pyp? Might be relevant, since it is about image processing, pipelines and Python.

https://thepyedpiper.github.io/pyp/

I've not heard of Pyp but it looks interesting. I don't immediately see how it would integrate with this project but I'll put this in my back pocket. My project uses a python environment in MATLAB to import "nd2", a python package that wraps the Nikon ND2 SDK. It's extremely useful for extracting metadata about the microscope configuration the experiment used.

Camp Counselor (https://line72.net/software/camp-counselor/). This is a GNOME application for managing your bandcamp.com wishlist.

My wishlist has grown to >1000 albums on bandcamp. It has become more of a "things to check out" rather than an actual wishlist. I need to be able to keep ratings and notes on the albums as a listen to them. (Even if I don't like an album, I keep it in my wishlist with a low rating and notes).

I wrote it in Gtk4 with Vala, as a chance to learn Vala. I haven't done any desktop software since the Gtk 2 days.

Part of this decision was that I use a pinephone with phosh as my primary music player, so I wanted a native mobile app.

Nice. So how was it working with Vala?

I have generally enjoyed the language. My biggest issue is that documentation is somewhat limited outside of the core libraries, and being a niche language, you have some limited resources for help.

It is nice having a language that compiles to C with all the latest expectations of modern languages (lambdas, closures, async, and so on).

I have not even attempted to compile for Windows or Mac OS yet.

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