I'm interested in developing desktop applications and would love to hear your recommendations for the best resources. Books, online courses, tutorials, and any other learning materials are welcome!
Thanks in advance!
There’s a way to make native apps for each platform using Swift and XCode on macOS, C#/C++ and WPF (and whatever other ways of rendering desktop apps ms invented this year) for windows and multiple ways to do it for Linux.
There’s also cross-platform toolkits like Flutter (before google currently trying to kill that) and the liked by developers and hated by consumers electron (and its newer, much lighter, rust-based alternative Tauri), which lets you write low-level code for the system API stuff and HTML, CSS and JS for your frontend. Cross-platform apps have a tendency to feel more janky - though they don’t always do - however it lets you write a single codebase for multiple platforms if that’s what you need.
Another question - what’s your current skill-level as a developer? Have you built other kinds of software before or is this your entry into the field? That would partly impact what kind of material might be good for learning for you and which kind of framework you’d be comfortable with using.
The only downside is the documentation, which really needs an upgrade.
Just start building with flutter, it's the best maintained platform that's the easiest to reason around. Everything follows a well defined workflow, you won't spend 30 days just learning the variety of configurations people keep for getting each different platform running.
If you go native you'll spend so much time deciding on platforms, build tools, packaging, etc.
It's better if you just start building and when you find deficiencies in Flutter you know what you search for in other platforms. You can move to them then.
They have an active discord which is good. But it’s painful to go through the chats trying to hunt down an issue. I wasted hours and hours just there.
I very strongly recommend electron. Yes the bundle size is larger but you will save so much time and effort that it’s worth it imo.
I think generally Apple’s tutorial content when available is pretty good, making Mac apps is vastly easier today than it was in 2018, and if you’re a React developer a lot of the way of thinking carries over.
I did opt for using WebView2 for rendering all the fancy frontend stuff since I’m first and foremost a web dev and much more comfortable for building UI that way, so I kind of just made my own little electron, which is actually nice because the resulting app should be a lot smaller than any electron installation.
[1] a HUD overlay for RaceRoom, a racing simulation