I'm happy to see that this usage of Godot has continued. I've been interested in using Godot for application development since I saw their official "Apps & Tools - 2022 Showreel"[1] video. The only concern I see commonly mentioned is in terms of accessibility (lack of screen reader support, etc.) - which could be a major drawback for certain types of software.

[1] https://youtu.be/9kKp0oguzr8?si=tib32MgkXFqri7mC

I love Godot for games but it's clearly not designed for utilities. The editor constantly uses a percentage of my CPU doing absolutely nothing. I don't think Godot executables can stop redrawing the window, only lower the FPS. I don't want my applications to be like that.

What is the deal with accessibility & godot?

That's largely my concern with Dear ImGui et al. It's okay to have it as a debug environment in a game, it's not okay to have it as an application. The lead developer agrees: "I do know that Dear ImGui unfortunately does not align with requirements of accessible software. It was designed as a technical/debug tooling software to be used as an overlay over 3d/graphics applications which themselves tends to have little to no accessibility features. It's not really my fault that people have started using it for desktop-ey applications." (GH issue 7892)

I built a couple of desktop utilities with Godot, and they work fine on both Mac and Windows (I didn’t need to use them in Linux since they are mostly file grouping/management things). Pretty solid.

The one thing I don’t like about it is that you can’t really get the apps to look “native” in any shape or form, and that you have to roll your own widgets for a few things (which is why I went back to some of the wxWidgets stuff I have listed in https://taoofmac.com/space/dev/native)

I've written an article about why I think Godot is a good tool for general app development, not just for building games. The article talks about my experience working with Godot for a mobile app for musicians, as well as some insight from a WIP game project. At the end there is a list of other tools and applications that are built on top of Godot.

I hope you find it useful!

I agree but I just wish, I wish it had three things: - customizable native menu bar - native file dialogs - drag & drop support from the outside world

that would make it would be an excellent option for desktop app development.

Usually using game engines for app development isn't a great idea given the things they were never designed for in first place.

Very interesting- coincidentally I’ve been evaluating Godot for my own needs. Many apps have a “gamification” element that in my experience can feel clunky to implement on some frameworks- it then clicked for me that a game engine might be a better tool for the job

Great article. Another example I'm aware of is Blockhead, which is an experimental DAW that focuses on sampling and audio clip manipulation. The creator (@ColugoMusic on Twitter) regularly posts clips and progress, which I find fun to follow.