Microsoft and its quest for WinUI 3.0
Altair-Qu-Ten opened this issue · 6 comments
I'm sure some of the people here have heard about it, but if you're not familiar:
Windows' UI framework has been missing/broken for a long time now, which is why all the different programs you use on Windows all have their own look to their Windows.
Currently MS is developing WinUI 3.0, which will mean that prgrammers don't have to fiddle around with developing their Windows and GUI elements from scratch.
I'm bringing this up, because, I think, it could help our endeavor towards the holy GUI. Maybe there is a chance to actually team up with them? I have no idea, but a lot of hope.
I think it can be done independently of the group. Right now we're making the best program launcher for Unix, and if it's successful, we can port it to Windows.
This looks more like a tool for designing UIs within traditional UWP applications than it does a way to render novel graphics in userland. So far, we're planning to start development for a radial menu and eventually mouse gesture middleware on Linux, so this is more of a backburner project.
Makes sense, but couldn't the framework eventually be used for a Win port? I'd imagine utilizing these tools would prove practical eventuallly...
Am I mistaken that it's for designing UIs within conventional windowed applications? If that's the case, it couldn't support this use case. If it's able to do either windowless or transparent-window rendering, then it may become practical.
I'm not too deep into the whole topic, but I don't think that this is on their roadmap, in which case you'd be right, although you could still have a classic Window for configuration in a simple, if not fully intuitive way.
The issue is that, as of now, Windows is very restrictive in terms of rendering; whereas on Linux we can kind of do whatever we want, on Windows we have to create a dedicated window and we're only allowed to render within that space. This works well for desktop applications, but it'd cause trouble with a system-wide utility like we're trying to get at here. This may change in the near future, but I don't expect Microsoft to be very hasty about it.