jspaint.exe VS flexbugs

This is very polished and cool looking. Inspiring. I find this project's level of polish very inspiring.

It's lovely to see someone has captured this idea and expressed it in the right way to make it interesting to many people. I really hope this mode of desktop apps can take off, at least to the level where the community has something to explore for a while to see if it works. I made something like this for Chrome browsers a while ago, nodejs backends, vanilla front-ends, built-in packaging using pkg. It's just a nice approach: https://github.com/dosyago/graderjs

And I made a demo using the venerable MS Paint clone JS Paint^0. The dev experience was great, I literally just dropped in the front-end code to the right folder, compiled it and wham, "desktop JS paint" on 3 platforms, haha.

Using the ubiquitous local browser as the rendering / API engine for desktop just seems smart. And it's technically interesting, because you get to think in terms of how can you step back from the browser, the platform, the front-end and the back-end and come up with a general API that addresses all of it, which is kinda cool.

0: https://github.com/00000o1/jspaint.exe

Jspaint.exe – JS Paint as a cross-platform native desktop app\ (23 comments)

For old features yes, for new ones it depends.

https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs

First, we read all the articles that showed us how to use it. Then we need to understand the axes. After that, we needed to wait for browser support. In the meantime, some of us brave enough used float fallbacks. On top of all that, we needed to deal with bugs. Those were the happy times, but they got us to this point in the frontend development phase.

To actually contribute, there's some flexbox bugs here which are still valid. https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs

If you find yourself in a situation when you have to solve a flexbox related layout bug for IE11, you might want to have a look at this collection of known issues and workarounds which helped me a great deal in the past.

For functional stuff, sure, but I don't think this is achievable within the UI domain. CSS rules have implementation details that change how you write it, for example there's a documented set of issues in flex implementations maintained here: https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs

It might be practical and possible to become mainstream for some domains, but it's doubtful for others.

For example, I've regularly ran into flexbox issues that are Safari-specific. I've discovered these by testing in other browsers and confirming that the issue only shows up in Safari. A good reference of Flexbox browser-specific bugs is Philip Walton's flexbugs repo.