Wouldn't it be amazing if I could build desktop applications this way? Well, it would, but reality is a harsh mistress and at that point desktop embedders were still in their infancy.
Never, not once in my life, have building user interface made this much sense. The biggest surprise of them all was just how good working with Flutter felt. I do like to think that I have my share of UI development experience, after all, I have worked with nearly a dozen GUI frameworks on various platforms, so there's not much that can surprise me at this point right? Wrong. After several prototypes, decision was made and I went with Flutter. I'm quite contented with the end result, if I do say so myself, but the developer experience and overall productivity leaves a lot to be desired.Ībout two years ago, I needed an Airflow companion app for iOS and Android. It's a mixture of Qt and a fair chunk of platform specific code. The last desktop application I worked on was (still is) Airflow. So it feels like it's time to crawl out of the shadows, leave my comfort zone and try to help bringing some of the spotlight it back where it belongs. In the last decade or so the spotlight has been largely shifted to web and mobile, which does not make me particularly happy. It sparked an interest in user interface frameworks that's still going strong, more than 20-something years later.
Those text mode resizable windows in DOS felt like magic to me. I have been interested in desktop applications ever since I first saw Turbo Vision. Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos.