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Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

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Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#231

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

whb07 wrote: post #228
kokizzu wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's not low level disk access

Can you explain how it isn’t?

If you are accessing the file system, you are accessing an abstraction, not the actual disk data (which is another abstraction on top of the actual hardware).

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#232

Post by paulgb »

gundmc wrote: post #223
SubiculumCode wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also from a security standpoint, it seems to me that having all apps work in the browser is creating single points of failure.

Can you elaborate on the security considerations of this? It seems like you could just as easily say it's more secure because it reduces the attack surface to a well-tested program with mature sandboxing.

It goes both ways, the sandboxing means that the app has less access to the OS, but the flip side is that the open web has more access to the app (CSRF, XSS, evil extensions, etc.)

Coincidentally, I just published a blog post that touches on this from both sides: https://paulbutler.org/2020/the-webassembly-app-gap/

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#233

Post by mrkramer »

nodelessness wrote: post #128
signaru wrote: post #126

Modern browsers these days are powerful things... just a curiousity, are there non native browsers?

What's a non-native browser?

Any browser that is not running on a host machine then for example on Virtual Machine.

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#234

Post by fartcannon »

jrockway wrote: post #221

Native desktop apps are great. The reason that people don't write them is because users aren't on "the desktop". "The desktop" is split between OS X and Windows, and your Windows-app-compiled-for-Mac is going to annoy Mac users and your Mac-app-compiled-for-Windows is going to annoy Windows users. Then you realize that most users of computing devices actually just use their phone for everything, and your desktop app…

And therefore, beware any OS attempts to break cross platform browser compatibility.

Also I think you can deploy to all those things with Qt.

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#235

Post by smabie »

user_50123890 wrote: post #90

Don'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.

But like, do they. Personally, I've found using a high level native UI API (like Racket's) to be much easier than a webapp. More flexible and performant too.

Personally, I hope that web browsers die off and we go back to gopher for displaying information. I hate the web.

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#236

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

CharlesW wrote: post #224
ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can safely exclude 'collaborative web design' applications from the set of hardcore tools not gaining much from being implemented as web apps for understandable reasons.

And yet it is a hardcore tool, and does gain a lot from being implemented as a web app. Another example might serve your point better.

Ok, I see my point being not so understandable, after all. I didn't mean Figma isn't a hardcore tool, I meant that we exclude it because it specifically concerns with web technology (being a tool for web design) and leverages web to implement collaborative usage. So it's probably logical for it to be a web app.

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#237

Post by Optimal_Persona »

O God, please no! I can't see anything requiring true low-latency real time performance (like audio production DSP) ever being fast enough on the web compared to native. Also, when everything went 64 bit in recent years, developers got really lazy about memory management.

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#239

Post by fartcannon »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #193
burke wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Electron hater, I’m constantly surprised at just how much VS Code doesn’t suck.

My personal evolution has gone from Sublime Text 3 to Atom to VS Code to Sublime Text 3. I've never been a heavy plugin user, mainly sticking to code highlighting. The thing I really like is speed. Sublime Text rarely chokes on me. I love being able to type `cat some_one_gigabyte_file | subl` and getting it to open up with little difficulty. VS Code chokes on files of non-trivial size, and that was the thing I liked…

Vim handles large csv files pretty good, as well.

Not saying you should use it, just something that I found out years ago.

Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

#240

Post by alkonaut »

zabil wrote: post #37

Not yet for music production. DAW's, software synthesisers, drum machines, latency matters here.

I imagine DAWs like many others could be a very small native audio processing binary with a gui on top that can be whatever it wants. Some are already Java UIs over C++ backend (e.g Bitwig). Should be possible to do an electron or web frontend over the C++ backend too. Replacing the processing bits will be hard though. Driver interfaces aren't exactly the strong point of web dev.
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