167: Desktop User Interfaces

Intro topic: Jogging Metrics

News/Links:

• Unholy LLM
  • https://huggingface.co/Undi95/Unholy-v1-12L-13B 
• The reverse red herring  
  • https://www.blameless.com/blog/the-reverse-red-herring
• The "ens–tification" of TikTok
  • https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ 
• Response letter to Godot is not the new Unity
  • https://sampruden.github.io/posts/godot-is-not-the-new-unity/
  • https://gist.github.com/reduz/cb05fe96079e46785f08a79ec3b0ef21
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick:
  • Math Games with Bad Drawings by Ben Orlin
  • https://amzn.to/48qlg9A
• Jason: 
  • The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates
  • https://amzn.to/3LChBff

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • Factorio (Desktop Game)
• Jason:
  • AI Hero (iOS and Android)

Topic: Desktop user interfaces

• What is a user interface?
• Web and Mobile UI toolkits
• Desktop options
  • Qt
    • Cross platform, custom UI elements
    • Qt creator, code generator
  • WxWidgets
    • Cross platform, uses native UI elements 
    • WxFormDesigner, code generation
    • Can look different on different operating systems
  • Electron
    • Local nodejs webserver
    • Html/JavaScript technology
    • Requires interprocess communication to use other languages  
  • Jupyter notebooks
    • Mathematica-like notebook 
    • Not for distribution 
  • Streamlit
    • Python to web compiler
  • Game Engines
    • Unity, Godot, Unreal
• Tips for building desktop UI
  • UI is slow (startup time, interaction time)
  • Separate the UI from the engine & business logic