And I'm sure if you look at the Qt and Wx ecosystems there will also be many preexisting useful components, or ways to plug them in. Python seems to have very good Gtk/GObject bindings as well, so that should mostly apply the same way. Note that I mostly try these things in Gtk2/3 with either Perl 5 or Vala. Was also quite easily used, except that I gave up when trying to get the Flash plugin to run turned out to be not-fun. * I've tried building a specialized browser with WebKit. * Text Editors (via Gtk-Source or embedded GVim) * Media Players (Video and Audio) with GStreamer (0.10 can be okay'ish, 1.0 is very nice so far) Things that I've done on the side that weren't too hard and even more fun than I imagined beforehand: But it's hard to know what is out there, and how useful it would be. If it is just for a first try to experiment with structuring those kinds of application, or if your needs aren't even that complicated, it can even be quite close to trivial sometimes. This talk by Gary Bernhardt is relevant: those arguments aren't wrong, but IMO they don't outweigh the pros I outlined above. I hear the naysayers saying that it's a waste of time, that there are already 8000 different open source mail clients and music players and todo lists apps and that it's better to contribute to old open source projects than create your own, etc. When I'm at an interesting point, I'll open source it and write a few posts about it. I'm working on a few such apps myself (todo list, mail client, and a few others), as console applications using ncurses to make something with a responsive, smart, effective and efficient style of UI that I don't think has been done before (mostly because no one has been trying to innovate in the domain of console applications in the past 20 years- but I think interesting things can be done). Additionally, if it's something that works well for you, chances are that other people will like it- open sourcing it and getting other people to use it is a high of its own. It's a bit of work, but it's really cool and IMO one of the neatest things you can do for yourself as a programmer. You can get an MVP working in a few weeks of work (if you spend 5-10 hours a week on it), and then you can add features and tweak the thing over the months and years as you use it.Īnd in the end, you get a piece of software that you deeply know, to which you can add any feature you want, that is customized to fit perfectly in your workflow, etc. Sure, it isn't trivial - but modern languages and libraries (I'm a big fan of Python, both for the language and its ecosystem) make it a very reasonable project. If you can write code, I highly recommend taking a stab at writing yourself the tools that you use the most (whether that is a music player, chat client, text editor, etc.).
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