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Comment by lambdadmitry | Hacker News Reader

Are there any examples of great desktop apps done in recent-ish JavaFX? Something comparable to native MacOS apps like Pixelmator or Sketch?

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> Pixelmator or Sketch

These apps have had a lot of time put into their design–it's not just "we slapped Cocoa on this and now it's beautiful". Native apps being better is selection bias, since people who spend time on design aren't going to settle for Java messing up the UI or UX–so they just all use AppKit.

That's not exactly true or those people won't settle for Electron either. Obviously that's not the case and I wonder why. Is it just that Electron apps are easier to do, native apps look and feel better, so JavaFX is a sort of no man's land?

The point of Java on the desktop was cross-platform compatibility, but electron now occupies that same space — and decent JS developers are cheaper and easier to find than decent Java-desktop developers.

If cross-platform support is not a requirement, desktop Java is not even in the running.

You can find some examples of real world (often commercial) JavaFX applications here:

https://jaxenter.com/20-javafx-real-world-applications-12365...

I don't think you will find any "great" one there, though, but some look well designed.

JavaFX web site has a few nice looking examples.

https://openjfx.io/

Other than that, it is up to a product team to actually have designers helping defining the final L&F.

DSTE and Gluon Maps look great there, but I didn't find actual artifacts to play with. The app I was able to find (https://github.com/RohitAwate/Everest) has a very poor scrolling behavior on MacOS and generally seems pretty simplistic compared to its Electron counterparts.

Question is, does the problem lie on the tech or on those using it?

check out Gerrit Grunwald's work on JavaFX based controls on github[0], there are also demos on his youtube channel[1].

[0] https://github.com/HanSolo [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCPbe_sGZuimJUyd2rdR7kA

Probably hard to find anything that nice as anything using Java is placing cross platform compatibility above everything else.

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