On Friday, 29 November 2013 at 02:00:50 UTC, Chris Cain wrote:
On Friday, 29 November 2013 at 01:44:34 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
Still lacking proper beard ;)
A programmer without a beard! Blasphemy! Witch!
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But anyway, going along with what you guys are saying, if
you've ever seen reviews on Android apps, a lot of apps get
lots of bad reviews for not adhering to the Android design
standards. Using cross-platform toolkits are usually a death
sentence for your rating. So, there's a lot to be said about
making sure your app looks consistent in the OS it's running in.
Some apps do "get away" with something that is somewhat custom.
Take, for instance, Steam on Windows. It doesn't look like a
"proper" Windows application, but it works very well for it
regardless. That said, Steam on Mac is terrible because it
feels too much like a windows app there (mainly in regards to
scrolling behavior).
That all said, if I were writing a GUI app in D right now, I
would probably write my own toolkit and make something super
simple (but "good" looking) to test out some new ideas. I think
we really need an easy, straight-forward, and powerful UI
toolkit that takes advantage of D's unique features (such as
compile-time specialization, maybe using DSLs that compiled &
used at compile-time instead of runtime) while reflecting well
in comparison to the newest paradigms of application design
(think how Android & iOS apps are made and maybe even a bit of
web design). I can't quite precisely quantify what we need, but
I think a fresh approach to the UI programming interface could
set D apart in this area.
Simply using a translation of an old UI toolkit is "easy" but
will not make UI applications pleasing to develop.
You actually put into words what I've been thinking. I know that
people want "native behavior", and maybe one day it will just be
"intuitive behavior" instead of "corporate OS behavior".[1] But
with D we have a chance to do what you say in the last paragraph.
[1] What we expect of a UI is what we've been made to believe to
expect. It all boils down to "Architect or Bee?"
