User interface design for Windows?

banamaster · 2024-05-13T20:57:57.740Z

My team and I are currently in the planning phase for a university project, and we're deciding on which languages and libraries to choose.
We are developing on Windows for Windows (mainly - Mac and Linux support would be a future 'nice to have') and Swift seems like a nice choice to challenge ourselves.

Since I am responsible for the UI and UX design, I am wondering what libraries there are for Windows applications, since SwiftUI seems to be Mac-exclusive so far.
I find the standard Windows UI frameworks and libraries quite outdated, although I already found some promising libraries for C++.
What libraries are compatible with Swift (that are more modern looking and feeling)? Open source would be ideal, or at least free. Since it's a university project we have a very limited budget.

Are there any you can recommend?

Cheers and Tschö mit ö

grynspan · 2024-05-15T23:24:02.175Z

I suspect @compnerd and his colleagues may have some ideas in this area.

Datagram · 2024-05-16T14:09:51.108Z

Some reading I suggest to start:

InfoWorld

Using the Swift programming language with WinUI on Windows

A new open-source tool from The Browser Company sets us on the road to bringing Swift apps from iOS and macOS to Windows.

yizhang82’s blog – 15 Mar 17

Windows Runtime is not a Runtime

Clarifies what is Windows Runtime and why it is not a Runtime

stackoverflow.com

What are WinRT language projections?

windows-runtime

asked by Alfred Myers on 02:52PM - 15 Sep 11 UTC

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArcBrowser/comments/17jvzd2/announcing_open_source_swift_bindings_generator/?rdt=43397

GitHub

The Browser Company

The Browser Company has 60 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

And of course the Swift forums (windows tag):

https://forums.swift.org/tag/windows

Hoping this will help you starting your project.

compnerd · 2024-05-16T22:30:08.540Z

The sources that @Datagram recommended are great starting points. UI on Windows in general is complex.

You can always use the tried and true Win32/GDI interfaces for a basic UI application on Windows. This should be possible to do without much else than a basic Swift installation which includes the WinSDK module. For an example project of this, see GitHub - compnerd/swift-win32: A Windows application framework for Swift which uses the Win32 APIs and a layer on top to simplify the usage.

Modern UI applications can take advantage of other frameworks like WinUI. This will take a bit more effort to get started with. However, there are Swift projections available, and some example code at GitHub - thebrowsercompany/windows-samples: Sample Apps for Swift on Windows and https://github.com/thebrowsercompany/windowsappsdk.

There was a great video on YouTube that was posted by a member building up a news reader with the WinUI bindings which was incredible. I don't have the link off hand, but that is a great resource to look at as well.

Saleem

Datagram · 2024-05-16T22:44:40.171Z

compnerd:

There was a great video on YouTube that was posted by a member building up a news reader with the WinUI bindings which was incredible. I don't have the link off hand, but that is a great resource to look at as well.

Here the link I think Saleem refer to: