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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?

#321

Post by dkarl »

BubRoss wrote: post #87
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #27

Every single app that I use, I try and make sure it is native. I shun electron apps at all cost. It's because people who put in effort to use the native APIs put in a lot more effort in the app in general based on my anecdotal evidence. It is also more performant and smaller in size, things that I cherish. It also pays homage to limits and striving to come up with new ways of overcoming them, which hackers would have…

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…

> You probably won't see someone writing asm but creating crazy O^2 algorithms

I watched a lecture by Bjarne Stroustrup that he gave to undergraduate CS majors at Texas A&M where he coded a solution to a problem using linear scans and then a "better" solution using better algorithms with better big O performance.

Then he did something interesting. He did a test on a tiny data set to demonstrate that the solution with linear scans was faster, and he asked the audience to guess at what data size the more efficient algorithms would start to beat the linear scan. After the audience members threw out a wide range of guesses he confessed that he didn't know. He had tried to test it that afternoon, but the linear scans outperformed the "better" algorithms on any data set that he could allocate memory for on his laptop.

IIRC he finished by telling them that professionals often do performance optimization the opposite of how the books present it. Using an algorithm with optimal big-O scaling isn't the optimized solution. It's the safe answer that you start with if you aren't bothering to optimize. When you need better performance, you evaluate your algorithms using real data and real machines and qualify your evaluations based on the characteristics (size, etc.) of the data.

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

#322

Post by jcelerier »

avmich wrote: post #310
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…

Do you count Qt apps as native, but not count web apps as native? Why?

a few reasons :

- Qt is actually the native toolkit of multiple operating systems (Jolla for instance and KDE Plasma) - you just need to have a Linux kernel running and it handles the rest. It also does the effort of going to look for the user theme for widgets to mix in with the rest of the platform, while web apps completely disregard that.

- Windows has at least 4 different UI toolkits now which all render kinda differently (win32, winforms, wpf, the upcoming winui, whatever is using Office) - only Win32 is the native one in the original sense of the term (that is, rendering of some stuff was originally done in-kernel for more performance). So it does not really matter on that platform I believe. Mac sure is more consistent, but even then ... most of the apps I use on a mac aren't cocoa apps.

- The useful distinction for me (more than native and non-native) is, if you handle a mouse event, how many layers of deciphering and translation has it to go through, and are these layers in native code (eg. compiled to asm). As it reliably means that user interaction will have much less latency than if you have to go through interpreted code, GC, ...

Of course you can make Qt look deliberately non-native if you want, but by default it tries its best - see https://code.woboq.org/qt5/qtbase/src/plugins/platforms/coco... and code such as https://code.woboq.org/qt5/qtbase/src/plugins/platforms/wind...

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

#323

Post by thrower123 »

ninjakeyboard wrote: post #314
Groxx wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep periodically re-trying VSCode, but holy cow. It's a massive step down from a Jetbrains IDE, in every single language I've dev'd in. Jetbrains stuff works , VSCode mostly handles the basics if it's possible to configure it correctly . Which is quite the achievement, and it's a very reasonable option and far better than much that came before it. But it's not where I want to spend my time if I can avoid it.

You're working with statically typed compiled languages tho. Once you try using a dynamic language you realize another editor is enough IMO. I use emacs for anything dynamically typed (including compiled languages like elixir) and intellij for scala/java.

Webstorm or PyCharm isn't as good as IntelliJ or ReSharper, but holy hell is it better than just a text editor, even emacs.

I really don't understand why so many programmers proudly proclaim that they do things the hard way and wear that as a badge of honor.

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

#324

Post by pessimizer »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #282
tpush wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concerning the desktop, I honestly don't see Windows users caring much about non-native UIs. Windows apps to this day are a hodgepodge of custom UIs. From driver utilities to everyday programs, there's little an average Windows user would identify as a "Windows UI". And even if, deviations are commonplace and accepted. Linux of course doesn't have any standard toolkit, just two dominant ones. There's no real expectat…

During my days of Windows-exclusive computing, I wondered what people meant by native UIs, and why do they care about them. My wondering stopped when I discovered Mac OS and, to a lesser extent, Ubuntu (especially in the Unity days). Windows, with its lack of visual consistency, looked like a hot mess compared to the aforementioned platforms. And now that I think about it, would this made it easier, even by an infini…

> And now that I think about it, would this made it easier, even by an infinitesimal amount, for malware to fool users, as small deviations in UI would fail to stand out?

I don't think that's how fraud works in actuality; malicious actors will pay more attention to UI consistency than non-malicious actors (who are just trying to write a useful program and not trying to sucker anyone), inverting that signal.

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

#325

Post by smabie »

joshbaptiste wrote: post #251
smabie wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When why not just use gtk or qt and call it a day? Electron is unnecessary.

Mainly due to them being both more tightly integrated to C++/Python than JS/TS for building desktop apps.

Yeah, but, honest question, why would you want to use JS if you didn't have to? It's like, the worst language possible.

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

#326

Post by noahtallen »

heywire wrote: post #284
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.

I love vs code, and its plugin system, but if I’m on my laptop without a charger, I use something else. When I’m running vs code, my battery life is cut nearly in half.

What do you use instead? In my experience, normal IDEs (Android Studio, Xcode, Visual Studio) all perform worse than VS Code in terms of memory use and battery. :/

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

#327

Post by nitrogen »

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…

Ossia looks pretty sweet! I'll be checking that out for sure.

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

#328

Post by PNWChris »

WilliamEdward wrote: post #216
PNWChris wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they’re referring to the web as port 80/443 http(s) traffic. It’s the old World Wide Web vs internet distinction, if you will. Email really is just a protocol for message sending, and it lives on it’s own port with its own server. If you have an email client and access to an email server (POP/SMTP/however), you can use email over the internet but without the “web”. Basically, the web email client ought not…

It was the ambiguity of the word 'web' that tripped me up. You still need a network of computers for email to be useful.

Totally fair! Frankly, I only know the distinction from a high school computers teacher who was adamant about the distinction.

I guess the easiest way to get the name is to see the “Web” as a “web” of hyper text documents, where hyperlinks act as the strands in the web (graph edges, if you will).

Honestly, like you say, it’s all built on top of a computer network (yet another web/graph). As a consequence, the distinction never really made a ton of sense to me, either.

Alas, this is the common parlance, so it is what it is.

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

#329

Post by nitrogen »

pessimizer wrote: post #324
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During my days of Windows-exclusive computing, I wondered what people meant by native UIs, and why do they care about them. My wondering stopped when I discovered Mac OS and, to a lesser extent, Ubuntu (especially in the Unity days). Windows, with its lack of visual consistency, looked like a hot mess compared to the aforementioned platforms. And now that I think about it, would this made it easier, even by an infini…

> And now that I think about it, would this made it easier, even by an infinitesimal amount, for malware to fool users, as small deviations in UI would fail to stand out? I don't think that's how fraud works in actuality; malicious actors will pay more attention to UI consistency than non-malicious actors (who are just trying to write a useful program and not trying to sucker anyone), inverting that signal.

I don't know, I've read that e.g. spam will not focus on grammatical accuracy because they want to exclude anyone who pays attention to details. Also most fake Windows UIs from malicious websites I used to see weren't exact matches of the native UI.
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