87 karma · joined January 22, 2023
Swing was themeable but good luck if you ever try to do it. Customizing an existing theme is too hard. All components have opaque theme objects that are part of the complexity problem I mentioned and often hide functionality and parts you want to customize.
It's easy to shit on everything, but I really think UI could be done much better and that most or all toolkits make big mistakes that hurt productivity and cause a lot of suffering.
Building the web toolkit took enormous effort and it sucks in many ways (see article). Theoretically a new one could be created and could also work for desktop, but there are lots of reasons why that won't happen.
Eg Swing has all those problems, in addition to ugly themes. The uncanny valley resulting from trying to mimic native UI was bad. At least nowadays users don't necessarily expect native looking UI, even browsers don't do it.
It's not a question of can you make a nice UI with it. You can drive a nail with a rock. The high pain needed to be productive with bad tools leads to Stockholm syndrome. People would rather stick with what they know than go through such pain again to learn something new, and rightly so when the new one is likely just as bad in new ways.
You'd never design from the start the bonkers HTML/CSS, box model, and other junk we are stuck with, but browsers have a number of good aspects that you'd probably end up with in a complete redesign.
The problem is multifaceted. UI toolkits are very hard to do well (I have a lot of opinions on this, and my own crossplatform toolkit), even on a single platform. Just that alone is huge. There are basically no overall great UI toolkits, even if some have good parts. Even a theoretical great UI toolkit will have quite a task to achieve parity with what browser UIs can do.
If we could get past that (spoiler: we can't, no way in hell) then we'd also have to be willing to ditch all the legacy browser stuff to switch billions of users and devices to something new AND we'd still have many other big problems to deal with: getting the committee/everyone to agree without ruining it, security, privacy, etc.
We've accepted we can't really fix it, so the only thing we can do is keep extending it. That's how we got here.
Like you I was just tinkering, though I stuck with it for a long time. At that point I was 19 and literally living in my mom's basement.
It's all server side so there wasn't a huge amount you could do. The flame thrower was just the grenade launcher rotated upside down. The shotgun was my best invention, IIRC made up of two ELF guns rotated 90. Deadly up close with a delay before firing, only useful from afar to take off a sliver. Cloaking and hitting someone in the back with it was great -- click-click BANG dead. Good times!
To bring your own subreddit subscriptions into this, use a multireddit:
1) Go to: https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/
2) On the right, copy the link "multireddit of your subscriptions" which has all your subreddits separated by "+".
3) Replace <all-your-subreddits> in this URL: https://marioslab.io/projects/ledit/#<all-your-subreddits>
4) Bookmark the page. Or you can click the tag icon in the upper right to save it. Find it again by clicking the Ledit icon in the upper left, where you can also set it as default.
The end game is to either sell out or hire others to handle the drudgery. Ideally you can work or not work as you choose and everything runs smoothly regardless. How much revenue you divert to that cause is up to how much you can stomach doing yourself. It took me 5-6 years to reach burn out and need assistance. Now I'm in that ideal zone and it's much more comfortable. I doubt I'll ever sell as I'd have too much free time.
I do think it's possible to have a product you hate and lots of reasons selling and supporting it can be horrible. I just wanted to point out that even if you loved it, you'd still have some of those aspects. Finding a successful toehold is difficult. You might try and fail a number of times before doing it again. I'd be wary about giving up on a success unless you're super sure the annoying bits can't be massaged enough to be tolerable.
One thing I haven't had to deal with is marketing. I started the business with a Kickstarter but otherwise never had to actively peddle my wares. That's mainly due to it being a niche market, that the nature of animation is flashy/appealing and doesn't need to be explained, and by focusing on UI/UX/polish so users enjoy using it.
Anyway I don't think that's what Apple is doing. The are just being expensive, exclusive ass clowns, like usual.
Otherwise you can look at the Picoclick. It's 18x22m (height unknown) with no enclosure, with is 20.6x22.6mm and 11.6mm tall. Smaller than that is probably hard. I have never seen the Picoclick in stock, so you might have to build it yourself. It seems like a neat product, it's too bad the creator doesn't make it available.