this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Programming

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Why isn't there a way to make near-native desktop UIs that's similar in ease to browser and electron UIs? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming
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it seems ridiculous that we have to embed an entire browser, meant for internet web browsing, just to create a cross-platform UI with moderate ease.

Why are native or semi-native UI frameworks lagging so far behind? am I wrong in thinking this? are there easier, declarative frameworks for creating semi-native UIs on desktop that don't look like windows 1998?

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This is because each desktop operating system using a different graphics rendering engine—Quartz on macOS and X/Wayland on Linux, for example. In order to write an application that works on all major operating systems, you either need to use a graphics library that has already done the heavy lifting of calling the native frameworks under the hood or you have to do it yourself. Or you can use a web-based graphics library that has also already done that heavy lifting, with the added advantage that you can use languages like HTML, CSS, and Javascript to easily create visual elements. This is attractive when the alternatives like Qt are notoriously difficult to deploy and force you to use C/C++.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Quartz (usually referred to as Core Graphics) isn’t recommended anymore on Macs.

Developers should be using SwiftUI now, which is a completely different approach:

class HelloWorldView: NSView {
    override func draw(_ dirtyRect: NSRect) {
        super.draw(dirtyRect)

        // Drawing code here.
        guard let context = NSGraphicsContext.current?.cgContext else { return }

        // Set text attributes
        let attributes: [NSAttributedString.Key: Any] = [
            .font: NSFont.systemFont(ofSize: 24),
            .foregroundColor: NSColor.black
        ]

        // Create the string
        let string = NSAttributedString(string: "Hello World", attributes: attributes)

        // Draw the string
        string.draw(at: CGPoint(x: 20, y: 20))
    }
}

Here’s the same thing with SwiftUI:

struct HelloWorldView: View {
    var body: some View {
        Text("Hello World")
            .font(.system(size: 24))
            .foregroundColor(.black)
            .padding()
    }
}
[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Quartz is a layer beneath SwiftUI or AppKit. SwiftUI is still using Quartz under the hood. The way you use Quartz directly from SwiftUI vs AppKit is a bit different, though still fairly similar. A more fair comparison of the SwiftUI code would be:

struct HelloWorldView: View {
  var body: some View {
    Canvas { context, _ in
      context.draw(
        Text("HelloWorld")
          .font(.system(size: 24))
          .foregroundColor(.black),
        at: CGPoint(x: 20, y: 20)
      )
    }
  }
}

Alternatively an AppKit solution (not using Quartz directly) would be something like:

class HelloWorldView: NSView {
  override init(frame frameRect: NSRect) {
    super.init(frame: frameRect)
    let text = NSAttributedString(
      string: “Hello World”,
      attributes: [.font: NSFont.systemFont(ofSize: 24), .foregroundColor: NSColor.black]
    )
    let label = NSTextField(labelWithAttributedString: text)
    addSubview(label)
  }

  required init?(coder: NSCoder) {
    fatalError()
  }
}

In either AppKit or SwiftUI, you can access Quartz directly to implement custom views. However, most of the time the UI code you write in either SwiftUI or AppKit won’t call Quartz directly at all, but will instead be composed of built-in views, like (NS)TextField or (NS)Button. Under the hood, SwiftUI is mainly just using the AppKit components at the moment, but provides a significantly nicer way to use them (especially in regards to layout and data synchronization).