Ok, so this starts off as “Graphics for the JVM” which sounded promising, but then the first line starts talking about desktop apps and warning bells start going off. If you read the post, it’s totally fine…if you are trying to do fast drawing or something. But no, we’re making desktop apps, with circles and triangles and squares. This just isn’t how it works, and the reason is the same as it always has been: a drawing toolkit is not a GUI toolkit.
If you want people to make good apps, you need to give them buttons and checkboxes and text fields. If you don’t, we’ll, they’re going to do it wrong. Time and time again people have tried doing this and the best we’ve gotten out of it are game UIs and Flutter, which are a solid “mediocre” in the UI department. The former probably gets a pass because it’s allowed to be quirky, but the latter is literally run by a megacorp and it’s still struggling to get basic things right.
Heck, even Swing and HTML are better than this; at least they give you components that someone actually spent time on implementing and making half-decent. Maybe they suck, but they suck together in a consistent way that is at least partially battle-tested, a must for any GUI toolkit. They’ve gotten to the point where they’re no longer just a middle finger to people with accessibility needs.
Look, I don’t want to rain in this author’s work. If you’re going to treat it as an accelerated Graphics2D, go right ahead, this seems like it would be an excellent solution for you. JVM bindings to Skia seem awesome. Just don’t, like, draw something that looks like a GUI in it.
(I could go longer about the characterization of mobile apps as constantly being purged from RAM and losing your work and IntelliJ being a good Java UI, but that would probably make this divisive comment longer than it already is.)
If you want people to make good apps, you need to give them buttons and checkboxes and text fields. If you don’t, we’ll, they’re going to do it wrong. Time and time again people have tried doing this and the best we’ve gotten out of it are game UIs and Flutter, which are a solid “mediocre” in the UI department. The former probably gets a pass because it’s allowed to be quirky, but the latter is literally run by a megacorp and it’s still struggling to get basic things right.
Heck, even Swing and HTML are better than this; at least they give you components that someone actually spent time on implementing and making half-decent. Maybe they suck, but they suck together in a consistent way that is at least partially battle-tested, a must for any GUI toolkit. They’ve gotten to the point where they’re no longer just a middle finger to people with accessibility needs.
Look, I don’t want to rain in this author’s work. If you’re going to treat it as an accelerated Graphics2D, go right ahead, this seems like it would be an excellent solution for you. JVM bindings to Skia seem awesome. Just don’t, like, draw something that looks like a GUI in it.
(I could go longer about the characterization of mobile apps as constantly being purged from RAM and losing your work and IntelliJ being a good Java UI, but that would probably make this divisive comment longer than it already is.)