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If they use native widgets, they usually look really bad If they just “imitate” look and feel, they usually fall very short of the real thing

Either way, it’s bad experience for the end user

I don't know, I think the Racket GUI toolkit and JavaFX work fine for building cross platform standalone applications.

That’s two perfect examples! Racket seems to try to use native widgets, and looks horrible as a result, at least on macOS

JavaFX uses the same approach as Humble UI: they draw all the widgets themselves and have custom cross-platform look and feel.

We aim to be better quality version of JavaFX