Conceptually, I agree with you. Unfortunately, the waters have been muddied with respect to native platform tools. Honest questions:
Windows - Win32 (C API) or MFC (C++) or WinForms (C#) or WPF or ...?
macOS - Cocoa/AppKit in ObjC or Swift/AppKit?
Linux - Qt (C++) or Gtk 2 or Gtk 3 or Gtk 4?
2 for me: scuba diving and welding (not at the same time). scuba diving is such a surreal experience and incomparable to anything I've ever done. It's unfortunate that there are no decent diving sites close to where I live. Welding is an incredibly rewarding hobby that makes you forget about everything else because it requires a lot of focus. Being able to join 2 pieces of steel according to your own imagination almost feels magical.
Agreed! Avery Island is a salt dome and is interesting in its own right (just the salt dome). There are other salt domes nearby (Weeks Island and Jefferson Island). If you visit Avery Island and see alligators, you should leave them alone. Despite them appearing that they might move only slowly (and often they do move slowly) they are very fast and can outrun you.
I've been working on a cross-platform GUI system called Affiche.
The basic idea is to separate an application's UI semantics from the toolkit that actually renders it. The same application can currently be presented using native Win32, Cocoa/AppKit, Qt6, GTK3, GTK4, Swing, or a web browser. The UI can run locally or be rendered remotely by a client, without the application itself being rewritten for that environment.
I've also been working on a declarative layout format and, lately, a visual designer.
It started as a rewrite of an architecture I worked on many years ago, mostly because I wanted to see how far the idea could be pushed with modern systems. It has turned into a considerably larger project than I expected.
Still private and very much under development, but I'm curious whether other people have run into the same problem: maintaining applications that need to survive changes in GUI toolkits, operating systems, deployment models, or client environments.
30 years later, 76344,2701 is still burned into my brain. I used a DOS text-based program whose name I don't remember anymore. I know I used OZCIS.exe at some point, and Aladdin with GEnie.
I've been building CheckSitePulse, a website auditing tool that crawls sites and reports issues like broken links, spelling mistakes, accessibility problems, SEO issues, missing security headers, and content policy violations.
One thing I've focused on is producing reports that are actually actionable instead of overwhelming. I'm also putting a lot of effort into reducing false positives—for example with spell checking and URL analysis.
It's still under active development, but it's reached the point where I'm starting to get feedback from other developers and site owners.
I'd love to hear what kinds of website issues you wish existing audit tools did a better job finding.
The author also has a youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@PeterSantenello) with some really well done videos. He's curious, respectful, and gives a fair reporting of the different local cultures.
Windows - Win32 (C API) or MFC (C++) or WinForms (C#) or WPF or ...? macOS - Cocoa/AppKit in ObjC or Swift/AppKit? Linux - Qt (C++) or Gtk 2 or Gtk 3 or Gtk 4?
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