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by antareus 5713 days ago
The time is certainly ripe for a better language to step in and make cross-platform desktop application development easier. Seems like most anything you use (barring C++) necessitates shipping 20mb of dependencies.

I miss the pay for what you use model.
2 comments
glhaynes 5712 days ago
It seems to me that one of the main benefits of desktop apps is that they are tightly coupled to the platform. Great cross-platform apps are very much the exception.

So my vote goes to web for cross-platform while heavily optimizing everything else (everything client-side, at least) for the one platform it natively runs on. I don't see great user experience coming through a different route.

If you do need native capabilities client-side, hybrid apps that embed a UI built using web technologies are a potential option sometimes, too.

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jbarham 5713 days ago
Longer term JavaScript + HTML5 will get you most of the way there.
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antareus 5713 days ago
What if I want to burn a CD? Or make something like Cover Flow?
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jbarham 5713 days ago
WebGL w/ HTML5 canvas will let you build Cover Flow.

As to burning CD's, I did say that it would only get you "most of the way" there!

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