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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?

#271

Post by kick »

monocasa wrote: post #152
kick wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not XUL anymore, actually, as far as I know. That's why it ripped out support for XUL addons.

Firefox has been ripping out xul, but Thunderbird still appears to support it.

Only if you're using a ridiculously outdated copy:

changed

Add-on support: Add-ons are only supported if add-on authors have adapted them

changed

Dictionary support: Only WebExtension dictionaries are supported now. Both addons.mozilla.org and addons.thunderbird.net now provide WebExtension dictionaries.

changed

Theme support: Only WebExtension themes are supported now. Both addons.mozilla.org and addons.thunderbird.net now provide WebExtension themes.

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/68.0/releaseno...

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

#272

Post by Narishma »

camccar wrote: post #242
fartcannon wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And therefore, beware any OS attempts to break cross platform browser compatibility. Also I think you can deploy to all those things with Qt.

And pay QT like 5,000 $ a year to keep it closed source. No thank you. Would rather write it 6 times. Or just use electron.

AFAIK you only have to pay if you modify Qt itself and don't want to release those changes.

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

#273

Post by roblabla »

camccar wrote: post #242
fartcannon wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And therefore, beware any OS attempts to break cross platform browser compatibility. Also I think you can deploy to all those things with Qt.

And pay QT like 5,000 $ a year to keep it closed source. No thank you. Would rather write it 6 times. Or just use electron.

Qt is LGPL licensed is it not? LGPL license means you can distribute your app closed source, so long as the user can swap out the Qt implementation. This usually just means dynamic linking against Qt so the user can swap the DLL. The rest of your app can be kept closed source.

On iOS and Android the situation might be a bit more complicated, but this discussion[0] seems to say that dynamically linking would also work there.

[0]: https://wiki.qt.io/Licensing-talk-about-mobile-platforms

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

#274

Post by monocasa »

kick wrote: post #271
monocasa wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has been ripping out xul, but Thunderbird still appears to support it.

Only if you're using a ridiculously outdated copy: changed Add-on support: Add-ons are only supported if add-on authors have adapted them changed Dictionary support: Only WebExtension dictionaries are supported now. Both addons.mozilla.org and addons.thunderbird.net now provide WebExtension dictionaries. changed Theme support: Only WebExtension themes are supported now. Both addons.mozilla.org and addons.thunderbird.…

Literally here's a doc explaining how XUL has changed as of Thunderbird 68, the most recent version, released about a month and a half ago. Yes, some elements have been removed, but others have been modified and still exist.

https://developer.thunderbird.net/add-ons/updating/tb68/chan...

And that's in the add-on documentation, not even just internal development docs.

Also, describing information changed in the most recent stable release, a month and a half ago, hardly qualifies any older as "ridiculously outdated ".

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

#275

Post by ashtonkem »

robin_reala wrote: post #183
ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #144

I'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.

I think Figma’s success is less about being web first and more to do with filling in gaps in what Sketch offered, especially in collaboration. Today you need to buy at least 2 apps, Sketch and Abstract, to match the feature set of Figma.

Design is one of the areas where one could arguably create a native app, largely because the user base is much more homogenous in OS than most other user bases.

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

#276

Post by FpUser »

burke wrote: post #150
ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #144

I'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…

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

Same here. I am all native guy, including back end C++ servers but VS code is very decent. But then again I think the level of developers who did the main task is way above the average. And MS itself wrote that they worked super hard to optimize it for memory and performance. Something that regular developer usually ignores / does not really know how to do due to their lack of understanding how lower level tech works.

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

#278

Post by PopeDotNinja »

fartcannon wrote: post #239
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've tried pure text editors, but they haven't really grabbed me, and my fingers are quite clumsy.

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

#279

Post by kmarc »

Harrrr wrote: post #163
jleahy wrote: post #118

Earlier 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 are many PKGBUILDs on AUR that cactually download rpm / deb packages and unpack the binaries and deps from it.

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

#280

Post by digi59404 »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #144

I'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…

Both VS Code and Atom use significant amounts of WebAssembly and low level libraries to achieve that performance. In addition to that they've written their own view layer for an IDE in modern JS which makes it more performant and stable.

I despise electron and html-wrapper apps. But I gotta give credit where it's due. VS Code is pretty good.

With the advent of the new WinUI, React+Native on Windows, and Blazer. I'm betting the future of windows is more web based technologies mingled with low-level native libraries.

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