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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?

#421

Post by fbelzile »

CameronNemo wrote: post #283
doteka wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a personal project I am currently using this approach and can confirm it works great. I wrote just enough PyObjC to get myself a trayicon in the Mac menu bar, which shows a popover containing a wkwebview to localhost. Then I have all the app logic in Python, exposed to the webview through a bottle server, and Svelte for the UI. Highly recommended.

Do you distribute Python with your application too then? How well does that work?

It sounds like a macOS app, and python is distributed with the OS already. Just watch out for Apple trying to take away scripting language support in the future. There's also an upcoming Python version change in macOS 10.16 to look out for.

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

#422

Post by eldavido »

djhaskin987 wrote: post #417
userbinator wrote: post #396

As a long-time Win32 developer, my only answer to that question is "of course there is!" The efficiency difference between native and "modern" web stuff is easily several orders of magnitude; you can write very useful applications that are only a few KB in size, a single binary, and that same binary will work across 25 years of OS versions. Yes, computers have gotten faster and memory and disks much larger. That does…

> Yes, computers have gotten faster and memory and disks much larger. That doesn't mean we should be wasting it to do the same or even less functionality we had with the machines of 10 or 20 years ago. With Moore's law being dead, efficiency is going to get a lot more popular than it has been historically. I think we're going to start seeing an uptick in the popularity of more efficient GUI programs like the ones you…

I think the other major, major thing people discount is the emergence of viable sandboxed installs/uninstalls, and the accompanying software distribution via app stores.

Windows 95 never had a proper, operating-system supported package manager, and I think that's a big part of why web applications took off in the late 90s/early 2000s. There simply wasn't any guarantee that once you installed a native app, you could ever fully remove it. Not to mention all the baggage with DLL hell, and the propensity of software to write random junk all over the filesytem.

Mobile has forced a big reset of this, largely driven by the need to run on a battery. You can't get away with as much inefficiency when the device isn't plugged into the wall.

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

#423

Post by petilon »

zadjii wrote: post #51

I mean, we built the Windows Terminal as a native application because we didn't want users to have to be saddled with 40MB of a webview/Electron just to boot up a terminal. It might take us longer to make the terminal as feature rich than it would have with JS, but no amount of engineering resources could have optimized out that web footprint. When we think about what the terminal looks like in 5 years, that's what w…

I am sorry but Windows Terminal is the suckiest Windows app ever and gives me a headache on a daily basis. Try opening multiple instances of this app in overlapping windows, like most developers do. Then fill them with text. Now see if you can tell where one window ends and the next window starts. Because of nearly invisible borders all the windows sort of blend into each other. Worst usability issue ever. This terminal appears to be designed for people who open only one command prompt at a time. Please bring back the old terminal.

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

#424

Post by vb6sp6 »

kanwisher wrote: post #386
Slartie wrote: post #103

We're building POS applications for major retailers, and for this kind of software, native is king and will stay for the foreseeable future (with a few exceptions confirming the rule, of course). These applications need tight integration with exotic hardware, must satisfy weird fiscal requirements often written with native applications in mind, must run rock-solid 24/7 with daily usage and predictable response times…

A lot of ATM machines and POs systems are glorified web apps. Not sure why a web app can’t be rock solid. Certainly easier to go native since you only have one platform, but I don’t see it being required

A lot of ATMs are using Windows XP embedded.

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

#425

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jcelerier wrote: post #379
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> This is not really accurate. Qt relies on a lower level windowing system (X Window, Wayland, Cocoa, win32 etc. etc.). Qt also supports rendering directly on the GPU (or with software rendering on the framebuffer) without any windowing system such as X11 or Wayland - that's likely how it is most commonly used in the wild, as that's one of the main way to use it on embedded devices.

I'd like to see it do that on macOS ...

You're seriously suggesting that the common use of Qt on Linux systems is direct rendering without the windowing system?

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

#426

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

madeofpalk wrote: post #378
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

What does “native” even mean? Put a in an HTML page and you get a platform-provided UI widget.

It's not platform-provided in my experience, but browser provided. The result of when viewed in a browser on macOS has no relation to the Cocoa API in any meaningful sense.

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

#427

Post by Decade »

userbinator wrote: post #396

As a long-time Win32 developer, my only answer to that question is "of course there is!" The efficiency difference between native and "modern" web stuff is easily several orders of magnitude; you can write very useful applications that are only a few KB in size, a single binary, and that same binary will work across 25 years of OS versions. Yes, computers have gotten faster and memory and disks much larger. That does…

You are looking back at the past with rosy goggles.

What I remember from the time was how you couldn’t run that many things simultaneously. Back when the Pentium II was first released, I even had to close applications, not because the computer ran out of RAM, but because the TCP/IP stack that came with Windows 95 didn’t allow very many simultaneous connections. My web browser and my chat were causing each other to error out.

AJAX was not around until late in the Pentium II lifecycle. Web pages were slow, with their need for full refreshes every time (fast static pages an anomaly then as now), and browsers’ network interaction was annoyingly limited. Google Maps was the application that showed us what AJAX really could do, years after the Pentium II was discontinued.

Also, video really sucked back in the day. A Pentium II could barely process DVD-resolution MPEG-2 in realtime. Internet connections generally were not the several Mbit/s necessary to get DVD quality with an MPEG-2 codec. Increasing resolution increases the processing power geometrically. Being able to Zoom call and see up to 16 live video feeds simultaneously is an amazing advance in technology.

I am also annoyed at the resource consumption, but not surprised. Even something “native” like Qt doesn’t seem to be using the actual OS-provided widgets, only imitating them. I figure it’s just the burden we have to pay for other conveniences. Like how efficient supply lines means consumer toilet paper shortages while the suppliers of office toilet sit on unsold inventory.

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

#428

Post by StillBored »

djhaskin987 wrote: post #417
userbinator wrote: post #396

As a long-time Win32 developer, my only answer to that question is "of course there is!" The efficiency difference between native and "modern" web stuff is easily several orders of magnitude; you can write very useful applications that are only a few KB in size, a single binary, and that same binary will work across 25 years of OS versions. Yes, computers have gotten faster and memory and disks much larger. That does…

> Yes, computers have gotten faster and memory and disks much larger. That doesn't mean we should be wasting it to do the same or even less functionality we had with the machines of 10 or 20 years ago. With Moore's law being dead, efficiency is going to get a lot more popular than it has been historically. I think we're going to start seeing an uptick in the popularity of more efficient GUI programs like the ones you…

I said that 20 years ago, but so far I've been proven completely wrong. Skype/etc just keep getting bigger and slower despite, from what I can tell adding absolutely no additional functionality. In fact if you consider it can't seem to do peer to peer anymore, its lost features.

Very few companies are rewritting their electron apps in win32 (although they should be). Instead it continues moving in that direction, or worse. Crashplan rewrote their java GUI a while back in electron. Java UI's are mostly garbage, but compared with the electron UI it was lightweight and functional. The electron UI (besides shipping busted libraries) has literally stripped everything out, and uses a completely nonsensical paradigm/icon set for the tree expand/file selection. Things like slack are a huge joke, as they struggle to keep it from dying under a load my 486 running mIRC could handle. So blame it on the graphics and animated gif's people are posting in the chat windows, but the results speak for themselves.

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

#429

Post by modzu »

jrockway wrote: post #305
modzu wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

u forgot linux. :(

I started using Linux in the late 90s and have since lost all expectation of someone writing an app for it.

actually id say app support is better than ever (of course all the caveats that go along with being a 1% os apply..)

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

#430

Post by unnouinceput »

Good luck using peripherals that requires physical access to them. The day web browsers will have full physical access (well, they technically do but you guys understand what I am saying, right?) is the day hackers will transform internet into that dystopian world from the old movie with Keanu Reevs - Johnny Mnemonic (the short novel is even better btw).
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