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by userbinator 3869 days ago
Where an entire app is based on a Qt main window, it can display HTML-encoded or Javascript-encoded content in a QWebView widget.

So it's another one of these "web everything" things... which in my experience seems more like "how to make your app consume 100x more memory and disk space that it should". What is with this aversion to native UIs that I've been seeing more of recently (and the tendency to invent controls that don't work anywhere near as well as the native ones)?

In regards to that, this also tends to encourage some very convoluted schemes like creating a local web server to serve the page for the GUI:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8640520
2 comments
rco8786 3869 days ago
People are attracted to these solutions because they can build cross platform GUIs. Native UIs are great, no one is averse to them, people just don't want to write and maintain several different versions of the same thing in different languages.
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manamol296 3869 days ago
As @fernly said, Qt is a cross-platform GUI library and htmlPy isn't bringing anything extra in that field.

htmlPy is meant for easy GUI development and integration with popular frameworks like Django for standalone app development. It adds to the memory usage of the application due to the use of QtWebkit.

If you are making a not-very-complex app and don't want to go to lot of trouble for making GUIs for standalone version, htmlPy is a great solution. But if your app is conservative about resources, doing lot of memory optimization or needs features which can't be done using HTML, probably best if you use native UI.

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fernly 3869 days ago
The irony is, Qt _IS_ a cross-platform GUI, where you build your UI once and it looks like Windows on Windows, Mac OS on Mac OS, and the look of whatever window manager on Linux.
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userbinator 3869 days ago
The irony is, Qt _IS_ a cross-platform GUI, where you build your UI once and it looks like Windows on Windows, Mac OS on Mac OS, and the look of whatever window manager on Linux.

Looks like, yes. Behaves like, not really (at least on Windows.) The few Qt apps I have certainly do not feel as responsive as the native ones, despite (mostly) looking that way, so it is rather awkward. They're noticeably laggier even in simple operations like displaying a menu, or responding to window resizing/moving.

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rco8786 3869 days ago
> The irony is, Qt _IS_ a cross-platform GUI,

Haha, I didn't realize that(not familiar w/ Qt). Was just responding to the "why are people averse to Native UIs" question

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zokier 3869 days ago
What in your opinion constitutes as "native UI"?
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