So, I’ve been on a real web kick recently, with pretty much 100% of the new projects that I’m taking up (non-work related) are in the web development sphere. Of course, one can’t call themselves a purveyor of the wide world of Computer Science and be biased too firmly in any one field, so I decided to work on some projects that I’ve been throwing around in my head, that have desktop/non-web implementations.

For the first time in what feels like a long time, I messed with some desktop application GUI frameworks (qt, GTK+, TideSDK). Though I think QT is a little too heavy for what I want, and definitely too complicated as well as not open source, I did make some small test programs with GTK+ and (most interestingly TideSDK). I came across tidesdk lately, and thought it was interesting. It seems like the basic idea is to cover front end design with HTML/JS/CSS, and to do all the backend stuff in whatever language you want (not sure if it’s a good idea to write desktop applications in PHP, but to each their own).

My target language for this project is Python (just cuz). Using GTK+/Python was a breeze, and I was up with a functioning (but useless) example app in mere minutes, the same said for TideSDK. Though TideSDK is a little more cumbersome (since it somewhat enforces a structure to the app as well as some things like manifest and xml configuration) — I think it’s a more interesting framework. Sure, I could do the app in less-nonsense GTK+, but why not take the path less traveled. I’m excited to make some really good app designs that would be considerably more difficult (from a visual perspective) in GTK+.

Once this project is anywhere near completed, I’ll put it on Github, and get some links up here, but I’m loving it already.