Very few updates, and features to be implementing not coming. I have felt it possibly best to wait with saying something until I have something to show, but it is a bit off, so here goes.
The project is not dead and a lot of work is going into it. But a difficult decision has been made, and this means complete rewrite - and that takes time.
Without support for mobile devices, TF can not get proper reach.
It has not been easy to decide to scrap the current code base, and the reason upsets me.
It feels like the giants of the computer industry want to own the software ecosystem to such a degree, that distributing software becomes a challenging pain.
This leads to a lot of frustration when a lot of time goes into things that should be simple.
My profession is a backend developer. I did not anticipate just how much hassle it would be to package and distribute a portable app in a simple way.
But I am learning new stuff, and once the initial bits are done, it could speed things up.
@trunkfriends My (limited, parochial) view is that front-end, user-facing stuff is *hard*. There's a thing that I call "irreducible complexity" -- I've seen it happen repeatedly, and most obviously, in UI libraries/frameworks. You start with something simple, and then users (of the framework) demand more features, and eventually it becomes complex and unwieldy.
1/n
@trunkfriends So someone decides that it's too hard to use or learn, so they write something simple to replace it. And then their users demand more features and affordances, and it becomes complex and unwieldy.
This isn't a failing of the individual frameworks. It's a natural consequence of the domain they're working in. In certain domains, and UI is a *major* one of those, there is an inherent complexity, which can only be avoided by constraining the domain itself.
2/n
@trunkfriends So when something becomes too complex to work with, often the reason is that the domain itself is extremely complex, and that the developers of the framework have failed to understand that it's the job of a successful framework to *limit* the affordances of the domain to some (perceived) useful subset.
3/3.
@darkling My main issue is not the frameworks, though, but distributing it.
They claim their interest is to protect the user from damaging software, but have ways to make it so that software could do no damage.
It should be so easy to create apps to run everywhere, that would be safe for the user to install.
But Google, Microsoft and, by far the worst, Apple, seem overly eager to control everything you put on their systems, and get money for it, even for free stuff.
For linux, it is a breeze
@darkling I do not disagree with you though. UI frameworks are a jungle and it is bizarre just how much complexity is needed and how many competitive frameworks one must create.
The UI framework I used for TF though, was easy enough to understand, and in a language I know well.
Now I must venture into a bit of "the unknown".
The most important is to figure out if what is needed is actually supported.
And I am learning some new stuff that can come in handy.
I could become full stack.
Ohno
Trunkfriends
Hugo Mills