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francoistanguay

32 karma · joined May 20, 2021

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francoistanguay··on Uno Platform Studio Featuring Hot Design
You're totally right.

Uno sits on top of .NET for iOS/Android, aka Xamarin "Classic".

Single Project/Single Codebase with your choice of XAML or C# Markup, choice of Native or Skia-based rendering, works with VS/Code/Rider on Windows/macOS/Linux.

francoistanguay··on Uno Platform Studio Featuring Hot Design
Uno here. We have the same goals: Single Codebase Cross-Platform, targeting Web, Mobile and Desktop (including Linux). Uno runs everywhere .NET runs.

The approach is different where instead of creating an entirely new API, we aligned with WinUI's api (and UWP previously), making it source-code compatible with WinUI so you can leverage the WinUI's ecosytem (CommunityToolkit, 3rd party controls, ...).

By aligning with WinUI, you also get access to all the trained LLMs that already know about UWP/WinUI and therefore also work on Uno.

francoistanguay··on Uno: Create Beautiful Cross Platform .NET Apps Faster
Yes, it's all simply a matter of styling.

You can leverage some of our existing design systems like Material/Fluent and customize them: https://platform.uno/docs/articles/external/uno.themes/doc/t...

Or you can start from scratch and define your own styles.

By default, they will be pixel-perfect and look the same on all platforms.

francoistanguay··on Uno: Create Beautiful Cross Platform .NET Apps Faster
You can embed any native component per platform.

We're actively working on bringing an unified OpenGL control in our Toolkit so it works on all platforms and be ready-to-use. Stay tuned!

francoistanguay··on Uno: Create Beautiful Cross Platform .NET Apps Faster
Yes, on Linux it behaves similar to Flutter and draws directly to a Skia Canvas.

It used to have a dependency on GTK but no more since the 5.2 release.

There's just no notion of "native controls" that you can embed in an Uno Linux app like you could have if you wanted to embed a 3rd party native UIKit control on iOS.

francoistanguay··on Uno: Create Beautiful Cross Platform .NET Apps Faster
Uno was open-sourced in 2018.

Has been in development since 2013.

francoistanguay··on Uno: Create Beautiful Cross Platform .NET Apps Faster
Uno founder here.

Uno as a UI framework is and will remain FOSS. It's been our strategy from day one and core to how we operate.

We see real opportunities to build productivity-focused products on top of it that will bring licensing revenues. Our Figma Design-Code plugin is a proof point and we have a lot more to come.

Thank you for caring and for the insights.

francoistanguay··on Uno: Create Beautiful Cross Platform .NET Apps Faster
Indeed, an Uno app is a native app, it uses UIKit on iOS, Views on Android, HTML on Web, except on Linux where you only have access to our Skia renderer.

Therefore you can embed native controls.

francoistanguay··on Uno: Create Beautiful Cross Platform .NET Apps Faster
Uno achieves similar goals to Xamarin.Forms/MAUI. It's also based on .NET.

Main differences are that it also targets Linux+WebAssembly, and it's meant to be Pixel-Perfect so it would look and behave the same on all platforms by default.

It also offers a variety of additional packages out of the box and aims to be an end-end platform instead of solely a UI framework: Hot Reload, C# Markup alternative, a toolkit of mobile-first controls, design systems, reactive state management (MVU-like), recipes for Authentication/Navigation/Logging/DI/...

francoistanguay··on Uno: Create Beautiful Cross Platform .NET Apps Faster
You can create an F# class library and use it with Uno, it's all .NET. We just don't have a dotnet Template for it just yet.
francoistanguay··on Uno: Create Beautiful Cross Platform .NET Apps Faster
Sustainability explained here: https://platform.uno/blog/sustaining-the-open-source-uno-pla...

We're also building products of Uno with licensing, first one being the Figma plugin for Design-To-Code: https://platform.uno/unofigma/

francoistanguay··on Uno: Create Beautiful Cross Platform .NET Apps Faster
- Yes, Apache 2.0 - Web is meant for WebApps, not websites. Including Uno+DotNet runtime it's about 4mb compressed. - No WYSIWG editor, yet, but Hot Reload works really well.