Chromebooks run phone apps really, so I guess they run on the whole JS ecosystem that google uses for that? I know google is pushing for Dart/Flutter for their phone app dev, I have heard good things about Flutter as front end framework, but I don’t do front end so that’s the most I know!
Well, Android doesn’t use JavaScript, it uses Java for their app coding for the most part (hence all the law suits from Oracle). Although interestingly, Dart basically gets transcompiled into JavaScript and Flutter is a Dart library.
I think one reason why we typically don’t use HTML/CSS for desktop apps (outside of Electron) is that it’s much more heavyweight in terms of space, memory, parsing, etc., that what we typically do use. Although, I suppose it wouldn’t be impossible to do something interesting with it at compile time. For example, if you use XCode, the UI design files are actually saved as XML files (so conceptually not that different than HTML/CSS). However, when you compile your programs, the XML files get converted into a much more efficient binary format. I believe WPF works the same way.
The other problem with HTML/CSS is that they really was never meant to be used to design proper UIs. They were both meant to design documents and over the years whatever UI functionality it needed was hacked on, with a lot of help from JavaScript. As a result they have a lot of limitations that a proper UI description language wouldn’t have.
That said, certain aspects of HTML and CSS have been incorporated into the more proper UI description languages, such as using CSS color names and such.
I mean sure, you probably could design a UI using an HTML canvas element and a ton of back-end code, whether JavaScript or whatever else you use to hook into it, but it’ll probably be somewhat clunky.
Not anymore. Kotlin is now the officially preferred Android dev language.
Okay, but that was only 3 days ago. 
Ugh! How am I to trust your commentary when you’re so out of date! /s
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Optic Blasts are, weirdly enough, Not Lasers
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This popped up on my feeds today and it contained a UI library called Sciter which lets you define the gui with HTML and CSS! The algorithm gods have answered by prayers!
(this is similar to the time I was talking about seeing the Mike Dillon Band (a punk vibraphone group … yeah … I don’t understand myself) and comparing it to that moment when you see something new and it excites you so much you have this , “did I just discover a fetish?” and then being taunted by bird calls because one song of Mike Dillion’s is called Tiki Birdwhistle and did this insane birdwhistle/call during the set that sent a shiver down my spine. The next day nearly half my youtube recommendations were freaking bird calls even though I never used my phone to search for anything bird related!!)
Hmm, still requires JavaScript to hook into whatever native code you’re using.
It’s better than Electron, I’ll give it that, but I personally don’t think it’s that impressive. I’ve also used some of the apps they demonstrate were ass slow in my experience, although I can’t speak if it’s due to Sciter or the code behind the scenes.
The punch dimension is the best dimension.
This looks like the go-to framework for ransomware.
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I wondered what it reminded me of!
Wild guess: GDB folks DGAF and use GUD from emacs. There are many powerful but UI-minimal debuggers that exist so that they can be wrapped by whatever custom UI other developers might want to use.
I didn’t miss anything important since I was last lurking?
Veganism flame war.
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I’m sure I can catch up.
Does Adobe need a breaking up?
Remember that Davinci resolve is looking pretty good.
I’ve been seeing quite a lot of video editors on YouTube complaining about Adobe and saying how DaVinci Resolve may be their new replacement.
I’d be okay with that if Adobe is going to act this petty.
Adobe did nothing wrong.
Legally no, but they’re being dicks nonetheless.
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