I feel ya! I thought the same, until I discovered the world of combining Qt C++ and QML. QML is extremely easy to learn (I studied all the basics in one day using this Udemy course[1] (not affiliated, just love his work). BTW, he has many free awesome YouTube videos for Qt C++. Creating an aesthetically pleasing app in any framework takes a lot of effort (it's mostly about being focused on what necessary and then creating a lot of white space around it, haha). It's so easy to create beautiful, fluid UI with QML. I've created a short video that demonstrate what I'm working on currently[2] - a Kanban view inside my block editor (kinda buggy now, still WIP). Hopefully, this does inspire you that it's possible.
And it's actually pretty easy to write the C++ code. I don't really use custom sub-classing much. I use Qt's QtObject which allows me to create C++ object that work beautifully with QML. Bryan's course doesn't delve deeper as that, I had to do a lot of searching to figure it out. I hope to open source some of Plume's components to inspire others to do the same. Another point regarding aesthetics, it really takes effort, but Qt can be extended using community libraries. For example, if you want your app to look native on macOS and Windows with a sexy frameless border with a transparent window, then you could use the awesome qwindowkit[3]. Another example, I wanted to position the window buttons on macOS (the traffic light buttons) differently, but couldn't figure it out, and obviously this can't be done using Qt alone, so I looked at Electron's source code and saw how they do it there in Objective-C and incorporated it in my app (ChatGPT-4 wasn't very helpful at that). Now I really want to have these buttons' fill color transparent like Things 3 does, so I'm looking at how to achieve that haha. I already got some ideas. If you need any further help, let me know![4][5].
EDIT: A cool feature of combining Qt C++ with QML is that you get the performance of a compiled language like C++ with the reactivity, ease-of-use, fluid and easy animations (and more) of QML. You can see on Plume's website that it's 4x faster than the fastest comparable native app on macOS.
Thanks for the candid reply. Man... this sounds like too much for me. Oh well. Guess I'll use AppKit for now and if I wanna add Windows/Linux I'll bring in Qt. Definitely will come back to this comment if/when that happens.
And it's actually pretty easy to write the C++ code. I don't really use custom sub-classing much. I use Qt's QtObject which allows me to create C++ object that work beautifully with QML. Bryan's course doesn't delve deeper as that, I had to do a lot of searching to figure it out. I hope to open source some of Plume's components to inspire others to do the same. Another point regarding aesthetics, it really takes effort, but Qt can be extended using community libraries. For example, if you want your app to look native on macOS and Windows with a sexy frameless border with a transparent window, then you could use the awesome qwindowkit[3]. Another example, I wanted to position the window buttons on macOS (the traffic light buttons) differently, but couldn't figure it out, and obviously this can't be done using Qt alone, so I looked at Electron's source code and saw how they do it there in Objective-C and incorporated it in my app (ChatGPT-4 wasn't very helpful at that). Now I really want to have these buttons' fill color transparent like Things 3 does, so I'm looking at how to achieve that haha. I already got some ideas. If you need any further help, let me know![4][5].
EDIT: A cool feature of combining Qt C++ with QML is that you get the performance of a compiled language like C++ with the reactivity, ease-of-use, fluid and easy animations (and more) of QML. You can see on Plume's website that it's 4x faster than the fastest comparable native app on macOS.
[1] https://www.udemy.com/course/qml-for-beginners/
[2] https://www.loom.com/share/b40009316f6b420b9ece15a1f99e987c
[3] https://github.com/stdware/qwindowkit
[4] https://twitter.com/mamistvalove
[5] ruby AT mamistvalove DOT gmail