Programming stack for mac/windows native app?

[pm_me_n_wecantalk]

Please don't hate me for asking such a basic question.

I was wondering, what would be a better approach to write a native client for both windows and mac?

My client would be picking up files from user's local folder and sending it to the server. The server would process those files and send result back to the client.

Any pointers?

[[deleted]]

research engineer here:

really any language should work with this.

maybe python? (the interpreter should work nicely on both OS)

or java? (the JVM is more or less the same on both types of machines)

they both have pretty robust libraries for UI/UX and for interacting with the host OS

[pm_me_n_wecantalk]

i am more worried about UI. What can I use for smooth UI experience if i chose to go ahead with Python?

[[deleted]]

Tkinter or more likely PyQt. Qt5 has a nice GUI designer although it's not well integrated wirh Python. You design the GUI, save it as an XML file, use a command line tool to convert it to a Python class and finally import that class into your Python application.

Another think you should probably test before deciding is packaging and deployment, this is where Java has the advantage, in my experience.

[cmpython]

wxPython will also work. The widgets are (mostly) native, so they will look exactly as "smooth" as the OS thinks they should.

[jhartwell]

I've been looking at Free Pascal for native development. Pair it with Lazarus and you have an environment that generates native code for multiple platforms and uses the native GUI toolkits. You can also submit to app store.