@lunanane Paid tools that cost thousands of dollars a year are nothing new. As a former motion designer, I was always left speechless by the cost of the software and plugins I needed for my work. And if you don’t renew your subscription, your only options are piracy or taking up a completely different, fascinating pursuit. It’s also worth adding the endless paid courses and tutorials to that total.
Working with nodes slows things down! I’ve seen this not only in the challenge, but also in my day-to-day work. For example, to create a USER-FRIENDLY app that can be quickly deployed at an event and which has an intuitive, natural interface and the features you’d expect by default from user-friendly software — in Gamma, you’ll have to manually connect a multitude of nodes, and in most cases, you won’t end up with even a tenth of the functionality. Now, I use Electron and within 10–15 minutes I have: a timer to hide the cursor, full-screen mode that’s saved system-wide, position and screen state saving, an advanced settings menu accessible via a hotkey or a ‘secret tap’ on the screen, and any behaviour or feature can be implemented or modified on request; a 100 MB size, an executable file with an icon, and a whole host of other things I’d get tired of listing—all of which in Gamma require a lot of effort to achieve. Yes, it’s possible to significantly improve the architecture of some of the nodes in Gamma and get similar functionality out of the box — that’s exactly what I’m talking about; we need to change something in Gamma. That said, I tried the ‘C# project + Gamma’ approach and at one point ended up with one or two connected nodes, which led me to ask the obvious question: what’s the point of Gamma at all if I can simply write the project entirely in C#? And in that case, why not just choose any other technology: Rust, TypeScript, Go – or indeed, anything at all?