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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?

#291

Post by BubRoss »

ghettoimp wrote: post #117
BubRoss wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that there is a a correlation between lower level programming and better programming in general. You probably won't see someone writing asm but creating crazy O^2 algorithms that run on every frame with memory allocations that run in the inner loop. At the same time a native win32 program can pack significant functionality into a 20KB exe. Put these together and you have a program where everything is insta…

I strongly disagree with the idea that lower level is better. Yes, lower-level languages allow for programs with good performance, small executables, and so forth. There are many domains where they are clearly the way to go. But higher-level languages allow for better safety, tremendous productivity, portability, exploration, and flexibility. If you keep your data in an SQL database and you can easily query and updat…

You are arguing against a point I didn't make. I'm not trying to rehash nonsense language arguments. I'm saying that many times the easy electron route is also correlated with programming that gives poor performance even outside of electron functions.

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

#292

Post by api »

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 doesn't require that but even if it did writing it 6 times is vastly more expensive. People would just rather spend 500k on writing it 6 times than 5k on a license because they are somehow offended at the notion of paying for dev software or tooling.

It's a major reason UI coding sucks. There is no incentive for anyone to make it not suck, and the work required to build a modern UI library and tooling is far beyond what hobbyist or spare time coders could ever attempt.

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

#293

Post by api »

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.

It doesn't suck, but try Jetbrains IDEs. C++ and other "not JS" language support is vastly superior including refactoring that actually works.

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

#294

Post by boardwaalk »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #219
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…

VS Code is slow at basic things like having characters show up on screen after hitting the key. It's good at everything else though so that lag doesn't matter as much.

It probably depends on your hardware. I have an "older" (several years at least) Windows work laptop with iGPU that is quite sluggish with VS Code when hooked up to an external 4K display. However, it's snappy compared to Microsoft Teams in the same situation.

Meanwhile, my similar era MacBook with dGPU hooked up to the same screen is very snappy and I honestly would probably not be able to tell the difference in a blind test between VS Code and typing in a native text box (like the one here in Safari).

I'd consider myself pretty anal about latency -- I was never able to deal with Atom's, for example (disclaimer: I haven't tried it in years). I even dumped Wayland for X11 when I had a Linux desktop because of latency (triple buffering or something?) I couldn't get rid of.

But VS Code is not bad.

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

#295

Post by PopeDotNinja »

tomxor wrote: post #287
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…

I'm an atom user, and it chokes for the very same reason. However I also use vim for tweaking server side stuff, and use less by default whenever I want to read something (logs is an obvious one)... This is both for speed but also UX, i believe vim style navigation (which less basically gives you), is great for reading and searching - what I cannot stand though is doing more than small edits in vim, for development (…

I hear you on the value a text editor on the server side. I have picked up the basics of vi for this use case, but I ain't fast with it :)

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

#296

Post by guggle »

jcelerier wrote: post #281
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…

> Meanwhile, your web app may not be as good as native apps, but at least you don't have to write it 6 times. I must be living in a parallel world because I use a ton of desktop apps that aren't "written 6 times" - and write a few, including a music & other things sequencer ( https://ossia.io ). Just amongst the ones running on my desktop right now, Strawberry (Qt), Firefox (their own toolkit), QtCreator (Qt), Telegr…

Bitwig has been ported to Android ? Or IOS ?

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

#297

Post by ahmedbaracat »

spenvo wrote: post #285

Native apps can take advantage of OS APIs that are much richer than those via the browser (or Electron) pass-through APIs. For example, I've made a Mac app that lets you customize your Spaces (virtual desktops), assign names to them, jump to specific ones, track your time spent across them, and trigger custom events when you move to specific ones. None of this would be possible via a web app or electron app. Project…

Checking your app, sounds very useful :) Thanks for building it

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

#298

Post by jcelerier »

guggle wrote: post #296
jcelerier wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile, your web app may not be as good as native apps, but at least you don't have to write it 6 times. I must be living in a parallel world because I use a ton of desktop apps that aren't "written 6 times" - and write a few, including a music & other things sequencer ( https://ossia.io ). Just amongst the ones running on my desktop right now, Strawberry (Qt), Firefox (their own toolkit), QtCreator (Qt), Telegr…

Bitwig has been ported to Android ? Or IOS ?

I don't think it makes sense to use it on even small laptops screen to be honest so I don't really see the point. You'd have to redo the UI and whole paradigm entirely anyways for it to be meaningful on small devices. But there is certainly not any obstacle to porting - from my own experience with ossia & Qt, it is fairly easy to make iOS and Android builds, the difficulty is in finding a proper iOS and Android UX.

In particular C++ code works on every machine that can drive a screen without too much trouble - if the app is built in C++ you can at least make the code run on the device... just have to make something pretty out of it afterwards.

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

#299

Post by nikivi »

ahmedbaracat wrote: post #286

I am constantly annoyed by the web apps, not only because they consume so much resources, but because of the noticeable UI lag that drives me crazy. For example, I have been entertaining the idea recently of building a native Todo app for macOS because of how slow Todoist has become in the past few years.

I'd check https://www.2doapp.com

It's super fast and featureful

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