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0 pointsmatthewmacleod8y ago0 comments

I have no doubt that native UI development for multiple platforms is tricker than a single cross-platform browser-based implementation. But I do think the level of those barriers to entry can be overstated. Building a simple MacOS GUI is not complex; likewise for Windows and say QT for Linux. It requires a little bit of thought and a little bit of research, and more time than a single implementation. The output is also better by quite a few metrics, and my general feeling is that an application where most of the complexity is hidden away in a cross platform library with a very simple API is the best possible case for this approach.

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Aaargh203188y ago· 3 in thread

> I have no doubt that native UI development for multiple platforms is tricker than a single cross-platform browser-based implementation.

I would argue the exact opposite is true for anything more complicated than 'hello world'

matthewmacleodOP8y ago

I can agree with that from the perspective of a single front-end. If I were building multiple front-ends for different platforms, I’m less sure.

I do think that developers who have previously only worked with web tech have a distorted idea about native platforms though. I spent my whole career working on the web, intimidated by the complexity of native apps. It turned out that native UI toolkits really are very well suited to building native UIs with minimal effort!

Aaargh203188y ago

> I do think that developers who have previously only worked with web tech have a distorted idea about native platforms though. I spent my whole career working on the web, intimidated by the complexity of native apps.

As a native developer I have the exact opposite view. Web development is insanely complicated compared to native. It's a complete jungle of flavour-of-the-day frameworks all designed to make web-development somewhat workable (and all of them failing in some ways.

If you're building a website, you have little choice, but if you're actually building a desktop app it's totally insane to use web based UI.

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postfacto8y ago

> I do think that developers who have previously only worked with web tech have a distorted idea about native platforms though.

There’s an irony that people who will drop whatever they’re doing to learn this week’s hot crazy brain-bending quasi-DSL JavaScript framework think that learning Swift is too hard and don’t want to have to learn something new.

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