[yazriel]

Why oh why do people still write standard GUI applications in non-portable platform ?!

Its a mystery to me

[sergiotapia]

You either make it look beautiful in one place, or make it look like ass in three places.

Or, option C: You use Electron, like Slack.

[sanderjd]

I keep waiting for Slack to realize that they're a big enough company now that they can afford to make native apps that look and work better than the Electron version. I'd much rather have a real native app than a webpage inside some minimal window chrome. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

[baldfat]

Qt looks very nice to me. But then again my preferred GUI is ncurse in my terminal (urxvt) with tmux in a tiled window manager (i3).

[cturner]

Another option - you can do everything in a terminal. Not everyone finds minimalism beautiful, but - if you do.

[moonlighter]

There are benefits to having a pure, native app. Quiver starts literally instantaneously without any lag, partly because it's less than 5MB(!) in size. Here's a good read from the author: http://yaoganglian.com/2015/11/21/Quiver-3/

[kitsunesoba]

Yep. Speaking specifically about developing for OS X only vs. multiplatform, there are big tradeoffs to be made by taking multiplatform options outright. In my eyes, nothing is as great for UI-centric desktop application development as Obj-C/Swift paired with Cocoa/AppKit. It just works so well, and though Qt is probably the best of native multiplatform solutions it’s still not comparable.

[tehwalrus]

I was disappointed to see it was OS X only, but having written several GUIs (single and cross platform), I understand the trade off they made.

It really is one-platform or web, and web is not for everyone (least of all programmers writing notes about their code at work.)

[Cyph0n]

That's my experience as well. Electron/NW.js is the best option, but 1) it's like designing a website, which can get annoying at times, and 2) the file size :(

[kartan]

I agree on that. Unless you are developing a platform specific utility that is not meaningful in other environments, it is not a good practice to limit yourself. It also makes sense is when you are not creating a product bust just playing with a technology.

Even Microsoft is now doing multi-platform tools for developers (https://code.visualstudio.com/).

[akvadrako]

Because otherwise they don't look or behave nicely.

[st3v3r]

Or you end up writing the same product multiple times.

[wvenable]

Because the result is always better?

[marssaxman]

Might be a mystery but I'm really glad they keep doing it, because the alternatives are 1) all your data are belong to us, or 2) it looks terrible everywhere.

[mrmondo]

IMO there is nothing worse than a non-native app, especially if it's something designed for a web browser like NodeJS and friends.

[mamcx]

Then solve the mistery. What use that is truly good?