Forums | NoesisGUI

Hi,

Do you have plans to add the default styles for mobile platforms to make the standard XAML UI controls look native? Today I have found a very cool project that implements Google Material Design in XAML (it says "for desktop WPF apps" only, but... https://github.com/ButchersBoy/Material ... amlToolkit -- it would be great to support these styles in (or port to) NoesisGUI. I have not tested MaterialDesignInXamlToolkit with NoesisGUI yet -- when I have time I will -- but I suggest you take a look too ASAP! It seems really promising and cool!

If we can get the same style toolkit for native iOS UI look, it would be even a greater thing!

P.S. I suggest that those who are interested in mobile UI styles (including me) could 'crowdfund' a designer who is able to create such XAML styles those work in NoesisGUI. E.g. let him/her create a crowdfunding campaign, and we (NoesisGUI mobile developers) will support it. What do you think?

Regards,
Albert

This is an excellent idea Albert! Although not everybody is interested in having native look (games for example) I think that having these styles in NoesisGUI is a must have.

Until we release 1.3 we cannot dedicate time to this but after that we could start making the necessary changes to NoesisGUI to be compatible with those styles.

Regarding the crowdfunding idea, let's go for it. Do you have a candidate for the designer?

Hope you will release 1.3 soon Good luck with it!

No, I have no candidates for this XAML-design work. Maybe you find one... or else maybe he/she will read this message and contact us

I think it would be a very strategic move. Indeed, now that me and me team we are focusing in bootstrap+angularjs I'm wondering how we could joint efforts between mobile app development and html designing productivity.

To be honest, despite the time I spent with xaml, when talking about productivity nothing can compares with html/css helped by the hughe community around them (do a research of UI-Grid for instance).

In the other hand, Noesis has an espectacular performance when compared with rendering the html with WebView controls. We have an app in production for a client running in Android, and the scroll of a list of hunders of items (data templates with some controls withing) run smoothly and fast. Instead, opening a simple accordeon with 3 elements in android (chromium 47!) in a Lg G3 shits (in iphone 6 it's much faster because of Nitro engine).

¿How to get them together? Not maybe the purpose of current topic, but let me share some thoughts and then maybe we can open a new one:

1) Create an interpreter from html/css to xaml (it would not have javascript behavior but would be a start)
2) Adapt noesis to understand html/css (the same than above but better integration)
3) Adapt noesis to understand html/css + javascript and communicate with underlying engine (Unity3D, Xamarin..) (would be heaven come to earth)

This last one would be close to Colibry project from Coherent-Labs team, but their licenses costs (3500$ per app!!) is prohibitive. We are thinking about the possibility to hire a C++ guy/s to do this but my main concern is what would be the difference with the current native WebViews, I think that they are not slow just because of they want to be slow running javascript, and to add more variables to the game Unity3D conversion to Il2CPP to run with WebGl2 and implementing threads through html5 workers can push the balance too.

So, what do you think guys? Html/css seems to be the future (and the present) and sooner or later the devices will have desktop comparable performance

cheers!

Thanks for your comments Genom!

NoesisGUI was designed with the following pillars in mind (years ago):

• Being a technology 100% oriented for GUI. Rest of the products suffered with this problem. Flash, HTML, etc etc are not GUI technologies.
• Lightweight, C++, we wanted to offer a library 100% implemented from scratch in C++ with no dependencies to aliens like ActionScript, Javascript, or WebKit. If you want a different language instead of C++, you create a layer on top (like we did with C#).
• We love XAML. We believe XAML+WPF is the most powerful GUI API invented so far. In the last version of Visual Studio, Microsoft allowed their developers to use both XAML and HTML. Guess what technology is being mostly used.
• Performance above everything, even above rendering quality.

None of these pillars are going to change. Because if they do, the product wouldn't be NoesisGUI, the one we envisioned. That means no javascript, no html, at least in the core. We seriously believe there are no alternatives to NoesisGUI in a near future. No product satisfies all the principles exposed above.
I have been told many times that C++ is dead and that HTML is the future, but right now (and probably this is not going to change in the following 10 years) C++ is the only way to create fast applications and Native apps is the only way to go (remember the Facebook mobile apps fiasco?).

Hi jsantos, thanks for your comments too!

My thoughts about them:

Flash, HTML, etc etc are not GUI technologies.

Can't agree with you: first because they are (althoug nobody cares about flash anymore), you can have a look of a draft we are building http://profiler.linkbub.com/ it's a very easy technology to build GUIs.

Sencond, html is in the end just a mark up language as xaml is, more or less beatiful but it is less important that the underlying engine to render it.

In the last version of Visual Studio, Microsoft allowed their developers to use both XAML and HTML. Guess what technology is being mostly used.

I think you must be talking about former Metro apps (current UWP). In this case, we cannot compare XAML developers with HTML just simply because no one writes Modern UIs metros (none I mean when compared with WPF or MVC, not to talk about Android or iOS world).

In the other hand if we compare the number of new projects (for instance looking for .net jobs in linked in) in WPF with those ones in MVC I have the impression that WPF is getting used more and more just for existing projects to be maintained. And about MVC we can see as everything is moving towards SPA (ASP.NET site directly offers tutorials with Knockout and Angularjs)

No need to look for numbers, WPF is not and is not going to be part of .NET Core. Guess what technology is going to be used in the new .NET with MS opensourcing everything they have (e.g. ChakraCore: where they specifically declare their intention to get javascript to native performance and that they just forked Node.js to use it). We can add to the cocktail other things like WebAssembly, SIMD.js and the upcoming (see Unity3d roadmap) Shared Array Buggers for multithreading.

None of these pillars are going to change. Because if they do, the product wouldn't be NoesisGUI, the one we envisioned. That means no javascript, no html, at least in the core. We seriously believe there are no alternatives to NoesisGUI in a near future. No product satisfies all the principles exposed above.

Well, it is your product, and a really good I'm pleased to say (otherwise I wouldn't use it in production app)

I have been told many times that C++ is dead and that HTML is the future, but right now (and probably this is not going to change in the following 10 years) C++ is the only way to create fast applications and Native apps is the only way to go (remember the Facebook mobile apps fiasco?).

Never heard that C++ is dead (fortunately : ) However, about the Fb fiasco, I can give you a bigger one, I was there when MS throw to the rubissh (and all our efforts) with Silverlight.. And WPF is following the same path: to become a legacy platform (as well as WinForms, WebForms and MVC with Razor) we want it or not.

Regarding this, and what it is most interesting for me as partner in a little consulting firm: productivity. It doesn't matter that WPF and Xaml are incredible ones technologies. What matters (if you are a software factory, any size, but specially small ones) is Time to Market delivering the required quality. I never liked specially HTML and css but, how many developers, not to talk about designers, can you find that like or knows xaml compared with html ones? How many Gits for Angular directives or code examples (like Codepen) when compare with WPF?

The only problem now is performance, but things are changing and soon html/css/js will reach the gap, at least to look and feel like native ones (https://auth0.com/blog/2016/01/11/updat ... sults-link things are moving fast in this subject..)

I hate not having C# in the client side, but I can live with it (specially with ES6) but to be honest, do you think that WPF/XAML community is going to grow, remain the same or be in a slow decline opaqued by Html community?

You have a incredible performant product, If I had it I would be running to be the first one to adapt it to render pure HTML/CSS/JS like native and sell it Unity3D, Xamarin, .NET core, and wherever I could.

Cheers!

pd: btw WebGL will be a very good point for Noesisgui as well as UWP oriented architecture (as you mention in your Trello), if it comes before angularjs 2 or any of these framworks can get real native performance through apache cordova, which could be before one year according with my estimations

If there were enough interested parties, why not just start a Themes folder in the Contrib project?

No need to look for numbers, WPF is not and is not going to be part of .NET Core. Guess what technology is going to be used in the new .NET with MS opensourcing everything they have (e.g. ChakraCore: where they specifically declare their intention to get javascript to native performance and that they just forked Node.js to use it). We can add to the cocktail other things like WebAssembly, SIMD.js and the upcoming (see Unity3d roadmap) Shared Array Buggers for multithreading.

The first time C# was released (10 yeas ago maybe?) we were told that it was going to be faster than C++. It is 2016 and Microsoft is still inventing new technologies to achieve that. Javascript, apart from being an awful language, is the same, you can't compete with C++, at least not in real-time applications like videogames. Don't forget that we are not an app framework (like Xamarin for example). We are a middleware for realtime applications and videogames.

Never heard that C++ is dead (fortunately : ) However, about the Fb fiasco, I can give you a bigger one, I was there when MS throw to the rubissh (and all our efforts) with Silverlight.. And WPF is following the same path: to become a legacy platform (as well as WinForms, WebForms and MVC with Razor) we want it or not.

C++ is not even taught at the universities. It is like assembly 20 years ago. But there you have it, C and C++ leading the charts.

Yes, Microsoft is an expert destroying technologies. They don't have inertial problems having infinite money and resources. But that shouldn't affect us, in fact we are a branch of that technology and soon or later we will have our own multiplatform editor.

Regarding this, and what it is most interesting for me as partner in a little consulting firm: productivity. It doesn't matter that WPF and Xaml are incredible ones technologies. What matters (if you are a software factory, any size, but specially small ones) is Time to Market delivering the required quality. I never liked specially HTML and css but, how many developers, not to talk about designers, can you find that like or knows xaml compared with html ones? How many Gits for Angular directives or code examples (like Codepen) when compare with WPF?

Yes, you are true. There are more resources for HTML + JS in the web than WPF ones. But having said that, I would say that 80% of the problems or doubts you face in NoesisGUI can be solved by googling and searching in stackoverflow. I would say that is a good symptom.

I hate not having C# in the client side, but I can live with it (specially with ES6) but to be honest, do you think that WPF/XAML community is going to grow, remain the same or be in a slow decline opaqued by Html community?

Don't think so. But our business line is not having XAML dominates the market. NoesisGUI is planned to be the leading GUI framework for realtime apps. We have reimplemented XAML+WPF using videogame rendering technology. In videogames each cycle counts. We also believe that all the applications in the future will be videogames but that is a different story : )

You have a incredible performant product, If I had it I would be running to be the first one to adapt it to render pure HTML/CSS/JS like native and sell it Unity3D, Xamarin, .NET core, and wherever I could.

There are products already filling that GAP. Unfortunately, all them are based in WebKit making them big bloated monsters.

If there were enough interested parties, why not just start a Themes folder in the Contrib project?

Yes, sure. That would be the proper place to do this.