Sun tried with Swing.. and they were not a second tier company at the time. Also previous versions of OSX (before the rename to macOS) included a special theme of Swing to make apps to look more native in OSX (Jobs was happy to announce that OSX supported Java... when Java was sexy).
Then when RIA was a buzzword Sun/Oracle tried to modernise Swing without success. Today the only big Swing apps that I know are Netbeans and maybe IntelliJ (but I think that IntelliJ has tons of customisations on top of it).
So is even hard for a big company too. I guess the problem is that the framework will be always behind the OS, and you need to recreate all the styles or to create a thin layer with the common denominator between platforms.
Is interesting that different approaches to cross-platform UI (draw all vs thin layer) goes back to Smalltalk. AFAIK the idea of Swing drawing all the UI came from VisualWorks, while the thin layer of SWT came from IBM VisualAge
>Sun tried with Swing.. and they were not a second tier company at the time.
Swing was ill thought from the beginning. Over-engineered, too complex, slow (as if there were 2-3 layers between the code and the drawing engine), and looking bad in every platform...
>So is even hard for a big company too. I guess the problem is that the framework will be always behind the OS, and you need to recreate all the styles or to create a thin layer with the common denominator between platforms.
I'm not so sure that's a problem. You can always look different than the OS, and do a good job at it. Millions use the Adobe Creative Suite, Cubase, Pro Tools, StudioPro, etc, and their non-native UI is the last thing they complain about...
Heck, even Electron apps do that. Why wouldn't users like apps that look different from the OS, the way Electron apps do, but with far less memory usage, much speedier drawing, and better integration options with native widgets when needed?
Then when RIA was a buzzword Sun/Oracle tried to modernise Swing without success. Today the only big Swing apps that I know are Netbeans and maybe IntelliJ (but I think that IntelliJ has tons of customisations on top of it).
So is even hard for a big company too. I guess the problem is that the framework will be always behind the OS, and you need to recreate all the styles or to create a thin layer with the common denominator between platforms.
Is interesting that different approaches to cross-platform UI (draw all vs thin layer) goes back to Smalltalk. AFAIK the idea of Swing drawing all the UI came from VisualWorks, while the thin layer of SWT came from IBM VisualAge