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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?

#441

Post by bufferoverflow »

kuon wrote: post #435
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…

If you don't see web app replacing Blender, give a try to OnShape. I was so surprised by it. It is slower than comparable desktop app, but it is usable for real world projects.

> It is slower than comparable desktop app, but it is usable for real world projects

Which means that under a high enough load it will be unusable, while Blender will deal with it just fine.

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

#442

Post by manquer »

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…

If the browser is computationally expensive abstraction, so is the various .NET SDKs, the OS, custom compiler and the higher language of your choice. Yes there were days were an game like prince of persia could be fit in to the memory of apple IIe and all of it including the sound graphics, mechanics and the asset was less than 1.1 MB ! However the effort required to write such efficient code, hand optimise compiler output is considerable not to mention very few developers will be able to do it.

Unless your domain requires high performance(with wasm and WebGL this will also be reduced) or something niche a browser cannot not currently provide it no longer make sense to develop desktop applications. The native application is too much hassle and security risk for the end user compared to a browser app and is worth the trade-off in performance for vast majority of usescases.

While the browser security sandboxes have its issues, I don't want go back to the days of an native applications constantly screwing my registry, launch processes , add unrelated malware and billion toolbars to your browser ( java installers anyone ?) .

Till late 2000's Every few months I would expect to do reinstall the entire OS (esp Windows and occasionally OS X) because of this kind of shareware / malware nonsense native apps used to pull. While tech savy users avoid most of this pitfalls maintaining the extended family's systems was constant pain. Today setting a chromebook or surface( Default S mode enabled) and installing an ad blocker is all i need to do , those systems are clean for years.

I do not think giving effectively root access and hoping that that installing application will not abuse is not a better model than a browser app. It is not just small players who pull this kind abuse either, Adobe CC suite runs like 5 launch processes and messes up the registry even today. The browser performance hit is more than worth not having to deal with that

Also just on performance from a different point of view, desktop apps made my actually system slower, you would notice this on fresh install of the OS, your system will be super fast , then over few weeks it will slow down, From antivirus to every application you added , they all hogging more of my system resources than browser apps do today.

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

#443

Post by hombre_fatal »

StillBored wrote: post #428
djhaskin987 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Without a way for end-users to actually make judgements about application efficiency, there will never be any real pressure to make efficient, native apps.

Though the only measurement I think people would actually care about is battery impact, and even that is pretty much hidden away on phones except to the few people who actually look.

But the other problem is: who cares if Discord or a browser's HN tab aren't optimally efficient? You're just going to suck it up and use it. With this in mind, a lot of the native app discussion is technical superiority circlejerk.

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

#444

Post by 1cvmask »

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…

Your subdomain http://forum.ossia.io/ lacks an ssl certificate for the login mask.

You can get wildcard ssl certificates for your domain and all subdomains from Letsencrypt.

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

#445

Post by mlwiese »

eldavido wrote: post #420
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…

Agree 100%. I wonder how much memory management affects this. My journey has been a bit different: traditional engineering degree, lots of large Ruby/JS/Python web applications, then a large C# WPF app, until finally at my last job, I bit the bullet and started doing C++14 (robotics). Coming from more "designed" languages like C#, my experience of C++ was that it felt like an insane, emergent hodgepodge, but what imp…

There is movement away from stop-the-world GC, but not to reference counting. The movement is towards better GC.

The language Go has sub millisecond GC with multi-GB heaps since 2018. See https://blog.golang.org/ismmkeynote

Java is also making good progress on low latency GC.

Reference counting can be slower than GC if you are using thread safe refcounts which have to be updated atomically.

I don't want to have to think about breaking cycles in my data structures (required when using ref counting) any more than I want to think about allocating registers.

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

#446

Post by wtallis »

vb6sp6 wrote: post #415
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VSCode is Electron? I had no idea. That’s the only electron app I use willingly then! Good job MS!

The first clue is a text editor that uses 180mb of ram :)

For comparison, I just opened up an org-mode file in Aquamacs (Emacs with macOS native GUI) and it weighs in at 105MB, which is actually lower than I would have guessed.

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

#447

Post by [deleted] »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #426
madeofpalk wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#448

Post by bradleyjg »

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…

The other thing is that I trust the web browser sandbox. If I have to install something I’m a lot more paranoid about who wrote and whether it’s riddled with viruses.

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

#449

Post by manquer »

Not anymore, the security model for native applications is broken, OS does not sandbox applications as effectively as browsers do. Pre Web 2.0 you constantly had all sorts of installed in your system because of installers just doing as they pleased, Applications like Adobe CC abuse the root rights have critical security flaws because of this, run many system services, mess up registry, Oracle put adware on the JRE installers. Large and small companies constantly abused this. 5-6 months you would reinstall your OS just to get a clean base, the performance boost on a fresh install was always strange experience, you felt happy on the boost but you also sad will not last even few weeks.

While there are high performance and graphics heavy tools and niche products that still require native apps , with tech like WebGL , WASM , WebAssembly this limitation is also going away. Unless your application falls into this category where the gap between Browsers and native is still very big, do your users a favour and build a non native application.

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

#450

Post by madeofpalk »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #426
madeofpalk wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure that when you render just a in at least Safari, the browser will render a native Cocoa button control. If you set a CSS property like background colour or change the border, then it will "fall back" to a custom rendered control that isn't from the OS UI.

I did a small bit of research into this, and found plenty of "anecdotal" evidence, but nothing confirming for sure. I'm looking and interacting with the controls and they seem pretty native - if they're a recreation than that's pretty impressive :)

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