Hi everyone, I'm looking for examples of real appl...

# compose-desktop

[Sebastian Kürten]

Hi everyone, I'm looking for examples of real applications being build with compose for desktop already, i.e. not just examples/demos but projects that are on track to get used in production at some point. I guess with compose for desktop being so young there probably are not many projects yet, but I'd be interested in some pointers to projects on the rise

[jim]

Are you looking for open source examples or closed source?

The Jetbrains Toolbox is a pretty good example. Story here: https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2021/08/compose-multiplatform-goes-alpha/#toolbox

[Sebastian Kürten]

actually both are fine

[Sebastian Kürten]

nice and that one's actually distributed as a native executable

[Casey Brooks]

I've been working on an ambitious side-project for most of this year that I plan on releasing eventually, but there's no specific timeline for that yet. It's an app to develop board games, with a UI similar to IntelliJ, and a 2D-rendered "virtual tabletop" for playtest simulations. I'm keeping it closed source to keep open the potential to monetize it so I can't show you anything about it yet, but in time, as I get it in a more feature-complete state I plan on posting here to show the power of compose, and maybe release some of the widgets I've developed as standalone libraries.

I will say from my experience thus far that even though Compose is early-stage software, it is already an incredibly impressive piece of tech that is allowing me to do significantly more with UI than I would be able to with any other tech. This app is quite non-trivial is scope, but it is scaling with me incredibly well, and in general completely frees me from UI concerns because it's so easy to work with.

I have no major concerns with Compose Desktop in its current state, for either development or publishing, and see it continuing to be a great base for this project long into the future.

[Sebastian Kürten]

interesting, so the board games one can develop with that are compose programs itself or rather physical products?

[Casey Brooks]

Long-term, both. It would be like a "tabletop game IDE" that takes game designers from ideation/prototyping (playing the game in a Compose-simulated environment, eventually networked with other players) all the way through generating/managing assets for print to send to publishers. An even longer-term goal would be to have this toolset manage the data for a fully-digital version of the game (maybe using #korge, but Compose may very well be fully sufficient for this as well).

I've been playing games for years and started trying to develop them myself last year when the pandemic hit (the board game design industry is actually quite similar to software). But the current state of tools for board game development are basically non-existent, especially for early-stage development; everything's cobbled together from a bunch of different apps that leave a lot of manual work to move your game assets between. Initial setup is difficult and time-consuming, continued iteration is quite painful, and I'm trying to improve that workflow.

This is of course all up-in-the-air right now, but I've made significant work on an MVP of the game data editor and Compose-simulated tabletop. There are still a few things I'm working through related to user input of that environment, but it's nearly at a point where I could actually start emulating existing games and designing my own games with it, which is my current goal.

[Casey Brooks]

Here's a quick video showing what I've got so far, just to give you something a bit more concrete to see what Compose Desktop can do.

Untitled.mov

[theapache64]

@Sebastian Kürten I’ve created a dev tool with compose desktop.

GitHub : https://github.com/theapache64/stackzy

[Ken Xu]

Recommand my little project, a gui for scoop( command-line installer for Windows). Built with Orbit-MVI, Exposed and KoinDI. https://github.com/windedge/Scooper

[Sebastian Kürten]

@theapache64 fantastic, a very interesting app

[Sebastian Kürten]

@Ken Xu also quite interesting, thanks for sharing