Feedback / Question About Applications

Taking an input, processing it and then outputting it somewhere is the essence of all programming languages in existence, the only difference between a console application and the types of applications you are used to is where that input comes from and how it is displayed. The backend code to process that information will be pretty similar either way.

The term you are looking for is GUI (Graphical user interface) programming, and it is something that is possible in pretty much any language, though the frameworks and supported platforms will differ between languages.

For C# the most common GUI Frameworks are WinForms and WPF, it is worth noting that they are both designed exclusively for Windows at the moment. They are one of the few GUI frameworks available that has a pretty robust "GUI Designer" available that allows you to design GUIs without using much code, which is built into Visual Studio. Cross platform GUI development in C# while not impossible is not quite something I would recommend at the moment. Though if you are interested Xamarin is probably what you should be looking at.

For Python there are a myriad of GUI frameworks available, you can find a list here. TkInter is a cross platform framework that ships with Python so that tends to be pretty popular (Treehouse has a workshop dedicated to it). PyQt which allows you to make use of a cross platform GUI framework called Qt (This is another GUI framework that has a decent "GUI Designer" available for it) is also pretty popular.

For JavaScript it's hard to get completely away from webbased solutions since it was fundamentally designed to be a web language, however with a framework like Electron you can essentially turn a webapp into an application that runs from a local file and have similar abilities to a traditional application.

If you are interested in programming for phones then both Android and iOS have pretty robust GUI Designers built into their IDE of choice which are pretty easy to use. Android Studio for Android and Xcode for iOS. Phones don't generally use console applications at all so pretty mucn any course on phone development (including those on Treehouse) will show you how to design a GUI to go with your program.

To be honest I think part of the reason Treehouse does not have many GUI centered courses is that programming a GUI is in many cases quite complicated and it distracts from the backend code and core concepts of the languages which is fundamental to know regardless of the type of application you are building. Those concepts tend to be a lot easier to pick up in a simple type of application like a console program. And while console apps aren't great for client facing applications they are far from useless. They have the power to do anything a GUI app can, they are just more cumbersome to use. As such they are more commonly found in enterprises and the like where they are setup to run automatically or to be used only by select trained employees.

There are plenty of courses and tutorials for most of the frameworks I mentioned out there on the web, some video based some text based. I have a feeling Treehouse would not be super happy if I started linking to tons of competing course platforms so I'll leave finding them up to you, but it shouldn't be too difficult.

In general you just have to google for "language GUI programming" (where you replace language with your language of choice) and you'll find plenty of info about what frameworks are common and popular in that language. From there you can search for courses and tutorials specifically for one of those frameworks.

Edit: Added paragraph dedicated to phone app development.

I know Treehouse has a focus on web technologies, I've seen staff mention it from time to time. That probably explains why they don't cover app GUI's. There used to be an entire series of courses about (non-web) game development, but recently that entire topic group was retired.