Andre von Houck: Fidget: Let's rethink UI development with Nim (NimConf 2020)

This guy has me sold! Finally, someone who gets it. The vast majority of GUI libraries suck badly. Unfortunately, there's a good reason for it.

First, there are major layout differences. On a MacOS dialog box, for instance, the "OK' button is always to the right and "Cancel" is on the left, whereas on Windows they buttons are swapped. The user will either account for it with a separate layout, or ignore it. There are tons of other differences, including how MacOS uses a single menubar for all windows while Windows has a menubar for each one.

Second, there are differences in geometries. Using absolute coordinates and dimensions will not work, since the aspect ratios and dpi varies across platforms. In the demo, Fidget happened to pick neat simple layouts, but the majority of UIs are considerably more complex.

Fidget is bold and interesting, but its design is based on some naive assumptions. Google's flutter solved these issues by bypassing the native UI drawing and rerendering it to look as accurate as possible.

You are really onto something good. Great work!

I had a look at Kivy, a Python cross platform GUI framework with good support (AFAIR) for games. I think this is a very compelling alternative.

Nim is underrated only because languages like Rust have a cult following. Case in point, Rust libraries are almost all rewrites of existing things claimed to be done better.

There's a lot of potential here for Nim! Wow!

You deserve to breathe a little, since you have created a great tool.

Basing the main UI library of an ecosystem (programming language or a bigger software piece) on a proprietary SAAS editor that can become inaccessible at any moment - go bankrupt, go offline due to a technical fault, price itself out of availability - seems exceptionally short sighted.

Amazing !

This thing is just brillant and cool. Great!

your passion for is strikes me so hard. GJ, but please do sleep sometimes

Congrats, you re-invented RAD programming from 90' 🤣

this is just perfect! good work! and keep going please!

I like that it ships a draw to html canvas option. nice

Walled garden used to have quite a different meaning.. I don't think I've ever heard Linux described as such =)

ui programming is literally a complete disaster

Revolutionary!!!!

I hope this will all work out as you want it to. Everyone wants a simple UI framework but over time and more and more feature requests, they all tend to become more and more complex.

Awesome presentstion and library. :-)

Looks like Figma is only on Windows and Mac though. What about Linux users?

I am trying NIM after some time with Clojure(script) + re-frame and this seems like a great project to start with, thanks.

am i correct its $45/mo per person to use Figma with Plugins/Fidget? this would be a lot cooler with open source.

I climaxed

I can't wait to try this tonight!

Wow...It will change the UX/UI world...

Awesome Project!

So, since Figma is closed source, I rely on closed source software? QML already offers an editor very comparable to Figma, just open source and it already exports QML code, for years.

Qt? Qml? What is about them?

This is fantastic, keep it up

Andre, thank you for the presentation. Also, love your energy and passion for this. One thought though - is there a possibility of developing this such that there is a concept of components which can draw itself, which can have event handlers which can be overridden etc? A possible use case for this: Say, you have a dropdown control with a "ondropdown" event which can be overridden to fetch the list at runtime based on the entry in another field.

Hell yeah!

This is the most beautiful thing I've seen all year

Holy shit this is good

Nice work!

"Dear ImGui" says hi! 🙂

Brilliant! I've been looking for something like this. The best cross-platform solution I've found so far is Flutter, but it has always felt clunky. This seems like it could offer many of the benefits that Flutter does, but be way more fun to use. I love the minimalistic imperative style. Also, making it easy to use Figma for design seems like a really smart idea. I really think you're onto something here. Looking forward to future developments.

Nice job!