I'm convinced my retirement gig will be writing nice, native apps for my platform of choice.
They won't bring in a ton of cash, but I can continue to make beautiful apps that are fast, focused, and respect the user's time and computing resources.
I just made one of these! I learned Swift to build it. Fast, focused, uses as little memory and CPU as I can manage for a (lightweight) video editor.
It's been fun to work a bit closer to the metal than I've been with JS for the last few years. Made about 50 sales so far. Can't imagine it'll make me rich but maaan it makes my video editing way faster :D
Your app seams great from what you have on its webpage. But the webpage made my AMD Threadripper based tower spin up the fan like hell broke loose. Closing the tab in Firefox immediately stopped the noise.
Thats why I designed a Haiku native video editor with over 30 effects that does 4K UHD video, 3D extruded fonts, GLSL pluggins, and the package is 1.2Mb in size (Medo for Haiku OS)
If I had to pick right now, I'd choose macOS for a platform.
For tech, I'd consider both Cocoa + Swift and SwiftUI as candidates for UI components, on a case-by-case basis. Swift is not my favorite language (feels like I have to use Xcode; have yet to try out the JetBrains IDE), but it gets the results I want. Perhaps in the future, we can use Rust in a more ergonomic fashion to talk with native UIs.
Honestly, I'd love an ObjC-like language that interops with ObjC and has strong static typing with a dynamic typing escape hatch for metaprogramming.
The JetBrains IDE for it (AppCode) is pretty nice, but you have to use Xcode for storyboards and UI design; other than that, light years ahead of the Xcode experience.
My uninvited suggestion: take a look at the FOX Toolkit. A truly lightweight non-themeable GUI toolkit written in C++, for Windows and Unix/X11. It's actively updated, but it's essentially a one man operation these days.
I can confirm it compiles with the latest Visual Studio and runs fine on Windows 10 in both 32-bit and 64-bit. (Well it did last time I checked, haven't tried the very latest release.) You're right the screenshots are ancient, but the code itself is still being updated by the project's maintainer Jeroen.
The FOX codebase isn't terribly modern, as it's older than the standard C++ concurrency machinery, but it works.
It does look dated, but I use it daily (I use the xfe file manager) and it is bloody quick - every action is almost instantaneous compare to the KDE, gnome, mate or cinnamon file managers.
It depends on the target market for your application I suppose - if your target won't be happy unless they have html/CSS or similar animations, then using something with low latency isn't going to make them happy.
Personally I don't mind the Windows 98 look, it strikes me as clean and no-nonsense. Everything is clear and high-contrast. Unlike with many 'flat' themes, it's generally clear what's clickable. I realise not everyone likes the Windows 98 look though.
If someone is serious about developing fast GUI apps, trading off on themeability is the kind of thing they should consider. As you say, FOX really is fast. I presume this is because of its uncompromising hard-coded native-code-only approach - it's just a C++ codebase. All the drawing operations are implemented directly in C++. Unlike Qt, there's no JavaScript. Unlike JavaFX, there's no CSS. It's all just C++.
Perhaps a GUI toolkit could add themeability without any performance impact by implementing it as a compile-time abstraction.
> depends on the target market for your application I suppose - if your target won't be happy unless they have html/CSS or similar animations, then using something with low latency isn't going to make them happy
Right, but mattgreenrocks said fast, focused, and respect the user's time and computing resources, presumably in contrast to current norms.
They won't bring in a ton of cash, but I can continue to make beautiful apps that are fast, focused, and respect the user's time and computing resources.