I used an Akai LPK25 with my iPhone (using the Camera Connection Kit and a combined usb hub/dac) and an app called Simply Piano. They make a wireless version of that now that would simplify the setup a great deal. It is a mini keyboard and the keys are quite small, but in my experience it was fine for the beginner stuff (and the keyboard is useful in general later). As I said before, I stuck with this until the app started using keys outside the range I had.
Now, as for "did I proceed with more serious learning" - I alternate though a ton of hobbies. So I moved on after that, though still go back to it from time to time. But I also have other musical interests and it was helpful to those as well.
Also did a lot of music on the commute on my iPhone with Korg Gadget (and Caustic before that). Sometimes with a keyboard, sometimes without.
Isn't such app best implmented with some cross platform framework like flutter? It has support for all major desktop OSes and at leqast the examples run very smooth.
The short version is that Flutter's lack of rich text editing solutions at the time made it a non-starter. It's a common problem in the Flutter ecosystem from what I've seen, there's often 0 or only 1 quality package for many "advanced" desktop use cases.
I've found that the GUI library I tried (fyne with go) was mobile-first, so some desktop things e.g. file-open dialogs didn't have the functionality I expected (the "dialog" was actually drawn within the same window as the application window). Flutter is mobile first too IIUC.
Outside of Qt, languages like rust and go don't have a good solid desktop GUI development option.
You shall hear also about dark side of Flutter. It reimplements the whole UI rendering layer and UI components, so you lose all the flexibility, accessibility etc. of native components. On the other hand with Tauri or React Native you get browser or native OS components.
You don't have to reimplement them yourself, they already come provided with the same components as on the web, like buttons, forms etc (and there are also custom UI frameworks like forui which clones shadcn/UI if you're familiar with that). The point being, Flutter apps can run much smoother precisely because they reimplement everything rather than dealing with the legacies of HTML and CSS. Since your UI seems fairly simple to make in any UI framework, you could take a look at Flutter as well.
I do so with Rust also with the package flutter_rust_bridge which works great, I'm working on a mobile app that also simultaneously works on web and desktop when I tested it, even all the Rust parts.
> Flutter apps can run much smoother precisely because they reimplement everything rather than dealing with the legacies of HTML and CSS
Maybe in some cases, but I kind of doubt this statement in general. I just tried a Flutter demo from their official site and text selection doesn't even _work_ correctly.
I'll copy-paste a few lines of the example sentence, double click on one of the middle lines to start selecting by word (which it doesn't seem to even do), and then highlighting starts on the top line instead of the line I selected.
In general the flutter apps always feel janky and second-class to the platform they're on, because they never fully implement the exact behavior of each platform they run on.
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