A Short Update on VSKI - Ditching Flutter

I’ve spent most of my free time past month on a passion project. Re-imagining intefaces and drafting the architecture. My first goal is to create a new UI toolkit which would make it possible to interract with AI powered systems in an effective way, but with that I don’t want to break well known user experience. A challenging task but I think it’s possible.

The first and most important phase of the project is almost complete. I am currently moving to actual prototyping and development.

At the current stage I finished gathering everything I need to create a product. Which included quite a bit of research and creating proof-of-concept code (mostly scripts).

Currently my roadmap is just a task list meant to kick-off actual feature development. My first goal is to create an application backend which will interact with os and models. The second goal is to create a simple application shell and connect it to the bakend.

Roadmap

  • Initial research and PoC
  • Application architecture (70%)
  • Process manager
  • Application bakend MVP (10%)
  • Widgets/Frontend (5%)
  • Application shell

Architecture

I’ve decided to use a client-server architecture for many reasons. In essence, the application consists of three parts:

  1. App Launcher (process manager, tray)
  2. Service/Daemon (backend)
  3. Frontend

Technologies

After playing with different GUI libraries I’ve decided to ditch Flutter it in favour of GTK4, which turned out to be a decent GUI tookit. IMHO - It deserves more attention than it gets.

Everything else stays the same:

  1. Vlang + C
  2. Tensorflow
  3. GTK4

Most of the development is currently in Vlang. I write about 20% of code in C when it’s more convenient, mostly due to the fact that some libs use macroses and I don’t want to rewrite them in V.

Plans

I am moving to the stage when I actually can show something except drafts. If time allows I’ll roll out first examples by the end of the March.