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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?

#351

Post by irishcoffee »

IvanK_net wrote: post #342
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…

I think he did not mean "written 6 times", but more like Compiled 6 times, with 6 different sets of parameters, and having to be tested on 6 different devices.

CI/CD + uh... doing your job? I build one app (same codebase) on 4 different platforms often, it isn't terribly hard.

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

#352

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jcelerier wrote: post #322
avmich wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

This is not really accurate. Qt relies on a lower level windowing system (X Window, Wayland, Cocoa, win32 etc. etc.).

Also worth noting that many creation-centric applications for the desktop (graphics, audio, video etc. etc.) don't look "native" even when they actually are. In one case (Logic Pro, from Apple), the "platform leading app from the platform creator" doesn't even look native!

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

#354

Post by BubRoss »

dkarl wrote: post #321
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…

> 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…

You are focusing on an example and conflating it with the actual point that I'm making, which is that electron is not only slow, but compounded by slow programming in top.

That being said... I know exactly what you are talking about and it was always strange to me, because it was actually iterating through every time to find a value first, so the iteration through the linked list would always kill the performance. Even so, basic linked lists are practically obsolete. This is not a good example of algorithmic complexity, because the complexities were actually the same.

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

#355

Post by baddox »

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.

Usually professionals using text editors for their work are not concerned with the absolute keystroke-to-screen latency. It’s totally fine if it’s fast enough, and it is.

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

#357

Post by fxtentacle »

A naive desktop app is the deluxe option. It'll always be more efficient than even the best web-technology based app, because it can skip tens to hundreds of layers of abstractions (e.g. Javascript, HTML, CSS, DOM) if done right.

So the questions are:

- do your customers care about performance? (gaming, 3D animation, music editing)

- are resource limits relevant? (embedded systems, mixing desks, broadcast, dvr)

- are people concerned about battery life? (pagers, medical equipment)

If none of these reasons for native apply, you can probably make your users suffer through a web app, which will be much cheaper for you to produce and maintain.

That said, people definitely notice the sluggishness that all web apps have. I mean those 100ms from click to screen update. So your customers will most likely be able to intuitively feel if your app is native or not, with native feeling better.

For some groups of customers, this premium feel might be a decision factor. For example, Apple TV (super responsive) versus Netflix (objectively slow website).

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

#358

Post by bartread »

jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #227
alasdair_ wrote: post #129

There are still a lot of fields where performance matters. This is especially true with apps that need low latency, like most games. Something like Stadia may be fine for a casual gamer but it still feels laggy to many, especially those used to gaming at 144Hz+ with almost zero input lag and gsync. VR is another area where native desktop is still superior. Then there is anything that is dealing with a lot of local da…

Stadia's games do not run in a browser. The client you use to interact with the stream is a web page, yes, but the actual game running in their servers is a native Linux application.

Yes, but I think that's the point isn't it? Of course the game runs on a Linux server because it couldn't possibly run in a web page due to performance reasons. Hence the complaint about lag.

You either get lag from the network roundtrip or lag from the crap performance in a browser (or you choose to degrade the experience, e.g., by reducing graphics fidelity), but one way or another you're experiencing lag (or a compromised experience).

Ergo the same game implemented as a native app running locally is going to be better[1].

[1] At least technically. It could of course still be a rubbish game.

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

#359

Post by kandeel4411 »

ken wrote: post #49
rohan1024 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he is saying that because with webapps you have - control over your software and updates - no one can pirate your software/service

How do you have more "control over your software" with a web app? With a native app, I can do virtually anything. With a web app, I can really only do what (Google ∩ Apple ∩ Microsoft)'s web browser teams decided to prioritize, and allow, and optimize. As for 'pirating', is that a serious concern these days? I've only ever heard about it being an issue at big companies selling software to other big companies, where i…

I think pirating is a serious issue in other countries (i.e mine), I practically never saw anyone actually pay for any office suite, adobe software and some offline games. All of them get pirated and very quickly too.

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

#360

Post by feifan »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #200
feifan wrote: post #88

IMO desktop apps aren’t quite equivalent to native apps. Native apps look and behave in a consistent way. They have • Familiar UI primitives: - Controls and chrome are in the same place - Font sizes are the same across apps - Consistent icons and button shapes • Support standard keyboard shortcuts (including obscure ones that developers re-implementing these UIs might not know about) - All the Emacs-style keybindings…

Consistency is maybe overrated? I purposefully make my FF unlike the other apps on my system. I use a couple of workarounds to prevent OS level keybinds from working in some apps. Sometimes a completely purpose made UI is better, sometimes. In general, consistency [in desktop UI] is good, but there are good reasons to break it.

The difference is you breaking consistency for your use cases, vs some product designer somewhere breaking consistency for all of their users for whatever reason without the end user having any say in it.

Pithily, the cost of a product designer’s novel portfolio piece is externalized onto their captive users.

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