Swing layout was bad then (gridbaglayout!) and is bad now. The framework's approach is bad. Components provide min, pref, max sizes that are very often just ignored. Components need a layout mystery object in order to participate. The mechanisms to measure and constrain components sizes and positions is bad. None of the layouts are sane and it's difficult to add your own. 95% of layouts are nonoverlapping components arranged in row and columns, but provided layouts do other things.
Swing was themeable but good luck if you ever try to do it. Customizing an existing theme is too hard. All components have opaque theme objects that are part of the complexity problem I mentioned and often hide functionality and parts you want to customize.
It's easy to shit on everything, but I really think UI could be done much better and that most or all toolkits make big mistakes that hurt productivity and cause a lot of suffering.
True those platforms have security controls, better than what we've ever seen on desktop. Desktop also needs controls like that: to use the system tray, filesystem, hardware, etc. There's at least a work multiplier of 3 for Windows, Mac, Linux. It's just one of many things needed.
Building the web toolkit took enormous effort and it sucks in many ways (see article). Theoretically a new one could be created and could also work for desktop, but there are lots of reasons why that won't happen.
Hard disagree. Lots exist but none are great. Usually layout isn't sane. Another blunder is components are too complex with too many layers. Customization and creating your own components becomes difficult. Often the event system is terrible.
Eg Swing has all those problems, in addition to ugly themes. The uncanny valley resulting from trying to mimic native UI was bad. At least nowadays users don't necessarily expect native looking UI, even browsers don't do it.
It's not a question of can you make a nice UI with it. You can drive a nail with a rock. The high pain needed to be productive with bad tools leads to Stockholm syndrome. People would rather stick with what they know than go through such pain again to learn something new, and rightly so when the new one is likely just as bad in new ways.
Ah. One difference is a normal desktop can access a lot more or even all of your system. Otherwise cross platform UI toolkits exist: GTK, Qt, Swing, SWT, etc. They could be great but they aren't, not because it can't be done well just no one has managed to do it well. They could technically be sandboxed but they aren't, or not well. Java applets tried long ago and a lot of systems got owned.
You'd never design from the start the bonkers HTML/CSS, box model, and other junk we are stuck with, but browsers have a number of good aspects that you'd probably end up with in a complete redesign.
The problem is multifaceted. UI toolkits are very hard to do well (I have a lot of opinions on this, and my own crossplatform toolkit), even on a single platform. Just that alone is huge. There are basically no overall great UI toolkits, even if some have good parts. Even a theoretical great UI toolkit will have quite a task to achieve parity with what browser UIs can do.
If we could get past that (spoiler: we can't, no way in hell) then we'd also have to be willing to ditch all the legacy browser stuff to switch billions of users and devices to something new AND we'd still have many other big problems to deal with: getting the committee/everyone to agree without ruining it, security, privacy, etc.
We've accepted we can't really fix it, so the only thing we can do is keep extending it. That's how we got here.
No, tables are the right solution: nonoverlapping elements arranged in a sane way that is easy to reason about. The arguments about semantics so everything can be a div are hilarious -- it really doesn't matter.
Close! It was 1 dev and 1 artist for a long time. Eventually the runtime and support load became too high and it's slowly grown to 9 people. Running lean was satisfying but exhausting.
Anyone can distribute the Spine Runtimes without a Spine license, but they have to attach the Spine Runtimes license, which means the need for a Spine license is pushed down the line to their users. In this way someone without a Spine license can use the Spine Runtimes in game toolkits/etc without having a license themselves. https://esotericsoftware.com/spine-runtimes-license
I didn't really expect anyone who played HaVoC to see my post. It's cool you guys are out there!
Like you I was just tinkering, though I stuck with it for a long time. At that point I was 19 and literally living in my mom's basement.
It's all server side so there wasn't a huge amount you could do. The flame thrower was just the grenade launcher rotated upside down. The shotgun was my best invention, IIRC made up of two ELF guns rotated 90. Deadly up close with a delay before firing, only useful from afar to take off a sliver. Cloaking and hitting someone in the back with it was great -- click-click BANG dead. Good times!
This is GREAT! The usability is through the roof, and supporting HN in the same way is super cool. It's similar to Sync but simpler and even better in some ways.
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Hello! Yes! It's cool you remember. I resurrected the site a while ago and gave it a domain. I also have a HaVoC server running on a Linode, so there will always be a server up. The master servers are a bit of a mess and it's a little hard to setup a client, but it's possible. I skipped T2 and haven't played T1 in a long time. I played Tribes: Ascend for a while, it's pretty good but now dying/dead. I miss T1. PubG and others just don't do it for me. Nowadays I play Rocket League occasionally and that's it.