zlacker

>>meetpa+(OP)
It is baffling how these AI companies, with billions of dollars, cannot build native applications, even with the help of AI. From a UI perspective, these are mostly just chat apps, which are not particularly difficult to code from scratch. Before the usual excuses come about how it is impossible to build a custom UI, consider software that is orders of magnitude more complex, such as raddbg, 10x, Superluminal, Blender, Godot, Unity, and UE5, or any video game with a UI. On top of that, programs like Claude Cowork or Codex should, by design, integrate as deeply with the OS as possible. This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.

>>Olympi+EJ
I used wxWidgets to build a native GUI for Windows + Mac 10+ years ago and implemented all GUI-drawing (it was an audio signal processor control software so included meters, faders, knobs, audio spectrum and I even incorporated Horde3D OpenGL interface for visualising an arena [sadly never fully finished to full potential as my modelling abilities in Blender simply wasn't good enough]). I wrote that, and another guy wrote the network library in C that sent signals to the network devices, and received them. I responded to the incoming network info to draw appropriate parts of the UI like meters/scopes at 50ms minimum.

The fact that we did this as a 1-man team for the GUI and that I can still compile it today (if I had the code) against wxWidgets, to then run on macOS and Windows simply shows the lazy nature of (most/all?) desktop apps by big companies these days.

I utterly detest using them, but it seems customers think an app that takes 5 seconds to launch with a spinning whirly wheel and horizontal gradient animation over list views for 5+ seconds before content is loaded is perfectly acceptable. Quality with a capital K!