Posted by claxo 11 hours ago
If anything, it’s my very faint hope that AI would give companies - especially non-software companies - the bandwidth to release two real native apps instead of just 2 builds of a shitty Electron app. Fat chance though, I think, not least because companies love to use their “bRaNdInG” on everything - so the native look and feel a real app gives you “for free” is a downside for the clowns that do the visual design for most companies.
Entry suggestions/completions are formally deprecated with no replacement since 2022. When I did get them working on the deprecated API there was an empty completion option that would segfault if clicked. The default behaviour didn’t hide completions on window unfocus, so my completions would hover over any other open window. There was seemingly no way to disambiguate tab vs enter events… it just sucked.
So after adding one widget I abandoned the project. It felt like the early releases of SwiftUI where you could add a list view but then would run into weird issues as soon as you tried adding stuff to it.
Similarly trying to build an app for macOS practically depends on Swift by Sundell Hacking with Swift or others to make up for Apple’s lack of documentation in many areas. For years stuff like NSColor vs Color and similar API boundaries added friction, and the native macOS SwiftUI components just never felt normal while I tried making apps.
As heavy as web libraries and electron are, at least work mostly out of the box.
QtWidgets is extremely good though, even if it is effectively in maintenance mode.
Avalonia also seems good too though I haven't used it myself.
For prototyping / one-offs, I've always enjoyed working in Tcl/Itcl and Tk/Itk - object oriented Tcl with a decent set of widgets. It's not going to set the world on fire, but it's pretty portable (should mostly work on every platform with minor changes), has a way to package up standalone executables, can ship many-files-as-one with an internal filesystem, etc..
Of course, I spent ~15 years in EDA, so it's much more comfortable than for most people, but it can easily be integrated into C/C++ as well with SWIG, etc.
In the near future I need to lash up a windows utility to generate a bunch of PDF files from a CSV (in concert with GhostScript), with specific filenames. I was trying to figure out the best approach and hadn't even considered Tcl and Tk - with Itcl you might have just given me a new rabbithole to explore! Thanks! (...I think!)
QCanvas (or was it QGraphicsCanvas?) has long since been replace with QGraphicsScene, which is much more capable and doesn't suffer from pixelation issues.
Anthropic has the resources of a fully armed and operational Claude Mythos (eyeroll), but they still choose to shit out an electron app on all of their users instead of going native like their competitors have done.
Just. Don't. Subscribe.
Simple!
That's a job for a web page. It doesn't need to be installed.
That's not true at all, any number of things could have killed bitcoin in its infancy. The stakes were just low. Somewhere out there is a lost collection of wallets of mine, collectively holding ~100btc ($1000 at the time). If regulators cracked down hard, that 100btc would have become just as worthless and either way I'd be out $1000.
"Risk" is an epistemic claim about the future taking the worse path. Obviously looking back it looks like risk-free money. That's not how it looked at the time. The "currency of the future" thing was always niche, especially after the crash in 2013, until a much larger cultural shift happened around 2015-ish.
Plenty of people will chime in with early bitcoin stories, and how they always believed it was going to go to the moon, etc. I always find it curious because my memory of the time period is that it was a means to an end, and that's how the overwhelming majority saw it and treated it. Funnily enough, it was thanks to that overwhelming majority that led to it being worth anything at all. If it was just a bunch of yahoos clamoring about the "currency of the future" thing, it probably would have gone absolutely fucking nowhere. The irony that the yahoos ended up becoming the majority I think is underappreciated.