I'm building a native music player in C++ for playing music I bought. I know there's Doppler for macOS but I want different ways of curating and interacting with my library (annotating tracks, custom tags instead of a simple enum for describing genres, advanced tag editing, bulk and transactional/undoable library operations...)
Also, now that code is cheap(ish), I'm implementing UI with a thin-layer of 2D draw commands that can be easily ported (CoreGraphics, Direct2D, Pango, whatever), which is by large the most painful part of it all.
Focus is reliability, UI responsiveness and resource usage, which is why I ditched electron even though it seems to be the only sensible option today for non-ugly, cross-platform GUI.
I’m self-teaching modern C++ by developing a native music library manager and player for Windows, macOS and other Unix systems. The main focus is on the 100% custom UI (with Direct2D/CoreGraphics/Cairo backends), aiming for responsiveness, power-user friendliness and compactness. The UI thread is absolutely sacred and I’m trying really hard to separate the core logic from the UI, because I hate how laggy and hang-prone all players I’ve tried are. I’m drawing inspiration from pre-2010 skeuomorphic and dense UIs. Key features include fast incremental imports and powerful UI elements with features like multiple column sorting, multiple element selection and keyboard-first navigation. I understand this problem is already solved, but I’m starting to DJ and curate my personal music library again. So far, nothing has been more satisfying than an old unsupported version of iTunes that doesn’t even support FLAC. I’ve tried foobar2000 but it doesn’t meet many of my requirements. Therefore, I’m building this software both because I have a need and because writing it is very fun (and frustrating at times)!
I’ve written a PoC already (mind the crappy and incomplete UI), mostly to test the wild custom UI idea, and it’s working so far! https://i.redd.it/ocx9m5av6d6g1.jpeg
Reminds me of japanese anime Dennō Coil, where kids would draw computer programs almost exactly like the author’s on the floor and invoke them as some kind of enchantement. Highly recommend it!
Ever since I discovered OrbStack, my M1 has become the perfect laptop for me. OrbStack has great UX, massive FS performance, Docker & Kubernetes support, and a bunch of really clever people behind it. Everyone doing linux development on a Mac should try it
Also, now that code is cheap(ish), I'm implementing UI with a thin-layer of 2D draw commands that can be easily ported (CoreGraphics, Direct2D, Pango, whatever), which is by large the most painful part of it all.
Focus is reliability, UI responsiveness and resource usage, which is why I ditched electron even though it seems to be the only sensible option today for non-ugly, cross-platform GUI.