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The "good old days" is now: Electron makes it easy to make a UI as expressive as you want - responsive, with beautiful animations, with whatever UI elements you'd like - and you don't have to learn anything new - just HTML, CSS, & JS (which all web devs know enough of to get by).



> The "good old days" is now: Electron

This has got to be one of the funniest opening lines, especially in response to visual basic.

I would begrudgingly accept electron if it had the same "open program, click button , draw a button, double click button, write code" experience that VB had


Yes, I definitely want my small GUI app to distribute a gigantic runtime and consume gigs of memory.


HTML everywhere killed professional-looking GUI’s. Web devs generally are clueless about application GUI design and usability. It’s sad.


Web devs: they’re all clueless, they’re all lesser, but for the life of me I just can’t seem to make the UI I want and by gum it’s all their fault.


I think the problem is that devs believe they need to create a unique snowflake app every time, each with it's own special sauce.

Visual basic was different because there was only one way to create a button, so no way to over engineer a new button component. All apps looked the same and nobody cared.


Visual Basic had control styling and the ability to even create custom components as well. For example, I created a textbox control with built-in validation logic in a matter of minutes and was able to drag/drop the control like any other native control onto forms.

I never cared much for VB as a language - but the IDE around it and the ability to very quickly create complex GUI applications was phenomenal.


"The problem" might be that people in this thread and others get frustrated because others have different goals than them.

Of course Electron is overkill for a single-button application. But Visual Basic is absolutely going to be a headache if you want a custom GUI.

Pick the tool that's right for the job!

I build this with Electron: https://videohubapp.com/ Good luck having infinite scroll in a gallery that is butter-smooth using something else (that also doesn't require months of learning new tools) and is cross-platform(!!!).


> All apps looked the same and nobody cared

We actually cared a lot, just in the opposite direction - apps which didn't look the same were weird and bad.




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