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Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
181–190 of 777 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#182Anything relying on DLTs has to be on desktop
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#183I'm going to be slammed for using these two words, but for any real work you need to have as few layers of indirection between the user and the machine as possible, and this includes the UX, in the sense that it is tailored to the fastest and most comfortable data entry and process monitoring. I don't see any `web first` or Electron solution replacing Reaper or Blender in a foreseeable future. One exception I'm intri…
Figma is pretty much replacing all web design applications precisely because it’s leveraging web tech for collaboration on a single document at the same time.
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
The " is cheap" mantra also really only makes sense if you are writing server code, where you yourself pay for all the memory your code will ever use. If you deploy code to a large number of users it makes little sense. If a million users start your app daily, and your app has a 5 second load time and uses 300mb of ram, you are wasting over 50 days of user time, and hogging close to 300 terabytes of ram.
So you are telling me that I can easily exchange development time which I would have to pay for end-user resources, which I would not have to pay? Sounds like a great deal.
In a fair society it should be taxed as an externality. There is a real environmental cost associated with software bloat.
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#185Well, I don't have a epic games account. Does that count?
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#186Don't care, i'll take a good web app over a shitty native app any day. Since native apps take much longer to develop and the UI toolkits are stuck in the 90s, it's pretty much given nowadays that new ones are shitty compared to the equivalent web one.
Personally I feel like webapps are really holding us back but to each their own
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#187Controversial opinion: Yes, native desktop apps are the future.
Msft is pushing on react-native-windows and macOS has project catalyst. React-native is making cross-platforms native apps viable.
Apps are way more immersive than the browser and it allows the developer to give a gamification experience.
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spotify is 273MB (on Linux at least), 70MB for the binary and 137MB for Chrome, plus some other bits and bobs. $ pacman -Qi spotify Name : spotify Version : 1:1.1.10.546-4 Description : A proprietary music streaming service Architecture : x86_64 ... Installed Size : 272.79 MiB So at least it's smaller than Slack.
I have a noob question, but how do proprietary apps (IE: Slack) make it onto the AUR without having an official binary?
There’s nothing to really block much on the aur. There are some guidelines in naming and no duplicates, no maliciousness etc that are enforced, but that’s it. But anyone can upload a build script (PKGBUILD) for anything.
If you want to see how it’s done search the package name and AUR and you can see the build script right on the website.
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#189I have a slightly different take - I wrote my own CMS based on Elixir. It's a static site solution, which means it generates, static HTML files that are then uploaded to a CDN (Eg. Netlify). My UI is done in VueJS and my database is actually inside of my application. I wrote a simple electron wrapper combined with docker in the background to deliver my CMS solution to my clients and it has worked really well for me. The reason being, I don't first of all need to collect my clients' data and store them on a central server, at the same time, my clients don't need to bother finding a hosting provider to maintain the site. They can just run this thing off their desktop and publish and be done with it. What's nice is, if they need updates and new features, they got to pay, which supports me and my work as well.
In fact, the whole project started out as writing a replacement for Wordpress from scratch. At least 6 of my clients' websites got hacked and one of them had a million visits a month. Simply because of stale plugins (it's easier to accumulate them than you think). So, long story short, I absolutely believe there is a place for desktop apps even in 2020.
BTW, I plan to open source my CMS soon :)
(and I do write about my journey here - https://medium.com/build-ideas)
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#190I'm going to be slammed for using these two words, but for any real work you need to have as few layers of indirection between the user and the machine as possible, and this includes the UX, in the sense that it is tailored to the fastest and most comfortable data entry and process monitoring. I don't see any `web first` or Electron solution replacing Reaper or Blender in a foreseeable future. One exception I'm intri…
VSCode uses a C++ backend to get that performance.
Yes, Chromium.