Recommend cross platform technology for GUI app

[u0206397]

Is there a relatively lightweight (development environment / platform / language) to write a specialized standalone GUI tool to run on a single machine.

No need to scale, no need to deploy for multiple users, or run on any network. Hopefully portable and just need to copy and run a compiled executable like .exe.

.NET: Needs the .NET Framework installed (likely on Windows) but Visual Studio is a huge monster. Compiled executables are small and easy to distribute. Windows GUI apps not compatible with Linux, since Mono uses GTK instead.

Java: Eclipse and NetBeans with its required JVM are big downloads. Don't see why I need to download a 100 to 300 Mb and just to run a 1MB/500Kb small tool.

QT: Need to do C++ and pesky memory management. Not sure about the compiler and IDE size.

Electron: Bundles in the entire Chromium engine and NodeJS. Minimum size would be at least 60 Mb? Using JavaScript for anything longer than 100 lines makes me want to kill myself.

Python: Heard it has problems with "pip install" and some Python packages if installing on Windows. Some Python packages need to compile C/C++ source codes during install and assumes GCC is available like Linux/Unix systems. But maybe can a make a GUI using wxPython.

Anything else to suggest?

 

[Azzizz81]

What is your target machine, what's installed on them? What does your tool do?

 

[Swiftbladez]

You can try out: https://proton-native.js.org

It is still JS though.

 

[davidktw]

Just a simple html page. Very portable and no need to install. Almost all systems will have a browser to interpret and run it. Question is what you need the GUI to do, what kind of specialisation you intended for it?

 

[u0206397]

What is your target machine, what's installed on them? What does your tool do?

Just a simple html page. Very portable and no need to install. Almost all systems will have a browser to interpret and run it. Question is what you need the GUI to do, what kind of specialisation you intended for it?

It is a custom tool to do image editing/processing.

Imagine it as a scaled down Photoshop with very limited functions graphics editor for composing and applying effects to graphics to generate artworks, background texture, icons etc. in certain predefined dimensions and sizes.

Could have automated the entire image composition and scaling process using a shell script or batch file. However, certain steps in the process require human intervention (experiment with several possible color choices for duotone, changing the layout of different image layers to prevent overlapping elements, or selecting a part of image for further processing), so I guess a GUI is needed.

All these can be done in any image editor, but to repeat it manually step-by-step in Photoshop or GIMP is

Maybe I will play cheat by using some language binding to ImageMagick in the background to do the real work.

 

[davidktw]

It is a custom tool to do image editing/processing.

Imagine it as a scaled down Photoshop with very limited functions graphics editor for composing and applying effects to graphics to generate artworks, background texture, icons etc. in certain predefined dimensions and sizes.

Could have automated the entire image composition and scaling process using a shell script or batch file. However, certain steps in the process require human intervention (experiment with several possible color choices for duotone, changing the layout of different image layers to prevent overlapping elements, or selecting a part of image for further processing), so I guess a GUI is needed.

All these can be done in any image editor, but to repeat it manually step-by-step in Photoshop or GIMP is

Maybe I will play cheat by using some language binding to ImageMagick in the background to do the real work.

You have not investigated photoshop and gimp sufficiently. Photoshop have actions to automate a lot of the stuffs. You just need to record them as you work. No coding required at this level.

Going deeper, you can do scripting within photoshop. https://www.adobe.com/devnet/photoshop/scripting.html

If you are prepared to whip up your own GUI tool, I suggest you do it much better within PS.

GIMP has scripting capabilities too, not sure about the actions portion though, do some research in this area.

 

[tangent314]

You can write your own gimp plugins

 

[Azzizz81]

I wrote a Gimp plugin once to extract edge data from shapes to feed into jbox2d for my side scroller game ~

 

[yamakazi51]

It is a custom tool to do image editing/processing.

Imagine it as a scaled down Photoshop with very limited functions graphics editor for composing and applying effects to graphics to generate artworks, background texture, icons etc. in certain predefined dimensions and sizes.

Could have automated the entire image composition and scaling process using a shell script or batch file. However, certain steps in the process require human intervention (experiment with several possible color choices for duotone, changing the layout of different image layers to prevent overlapping elements, or selecting a part of image for further processing), so I guess a GUI is needed.

All these can be done in any image editor, but to repeat it manually step-by-step in Photoshop or GIMP is

Maybe I will play cheat by using some language binding to ImageMagick in the background to do the real work.

You want to do those things, but you also said writing more than 100 lines of code can kill you?

 

[u0206397]

You want to do those things, but you also said writing more than 100 lines of code can kill you?

Electron: Bundles in the entire Chromium engine and NodeJS. Minimum size would be at least 60 Mb? Using JavaScript for anything longer than 100 lines makes me want to kill myself.

Just to highlight, I don't mind writing longer codes except JavaScript.

Anyway, I am looking at GIMP Script-Fu to see how much I can automate with that. It is like a macro based on Scheme.

 

[davidktw]

Just to highlight, I don't mind writing longer codes except JavaScript.

Anyway, I am looking at GIMP Script-Fu to see how much I can automate with that. It is like a macro based on Scheme.

Functional. Loved functional, especially Lisp