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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?

#461

Post by ajflores1604 »

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…

This writeup from a few years back caught my attention and gave me hope of near natively fast, cross platform electron apps https://keminglabs.com/blog/building-a-fast-electron-app-wit...

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

#462

Post by userbinator »

Decade wrote: post #427
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 er…

A Pentium II could barely process DVD-resolution MPEG-2 in realtime.

According to http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=423016#p423016 a 350MHz PII would've been enough for DVD, and that's 720x480@30fps; videoconferencing would more commonly use 320x240 or 352x288 which has 1/4 the pixels, and H261 or H263 instead as the codec.

Being able to Zoom call and see up to 16 live video feeds simultaneously is an amazing advance in technology.

I'm not familiar with Zoom as I don't use it, but it's very likely you're not actually receiving and decoding 16 separate video streams; instead a MCU or "mux box" is used to combine the streams from all the other participants into one stream, and they do it with dedicated hardware.

That said, video is one of the cases where increased computing power has actually yielded proportional returns.

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

#463

Post by modzu »

modzu wrote: post #429
jrockway wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..)

downvoters I'm curious to hear your counterexamples!

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

#464

Post by userbinator »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #443
StillBored wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 optim…

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.

I'd say it's more of a "without a way for end-users to compare" --- the average user has no idea how much computing resources are necessary, so if they see their email client taking 15 seconds to load an email and using several GB of RAM, they won't know any better; unless they have also used a different client that would do it instantly and use only a few MB of RAM.

Users complain all the time when apps are slow, and I think that's the best point of comparison.

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

#465

Post by zdragnar »

modzu wrote: post #429
jrockway wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..)

If wine and steam count as app support, then you're not wrong. It's pretty amazing what can run on linux nowadays compared to yesteryear.

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

#466

Post by searchableguy »

nicoburns wrote: post #437
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…

QT is excellent, but C++ is quite a tough pill to swallow for many. Especially as QT layers a macro system on top. I predict that native desktop apps will make a comeback when there's QT-quality cross-platform framework in a more approachable language (Rust, nim, or similar).

There are a few options.

https://github.com/revery-ui/revery

https://github.com/briskml/brisk

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

#467

Post by userbinator »

eldavido wrote: post #422
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 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 e…

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.

Bloated, inefficient software is certainly present on the native side too, but it's also possible to write single-binary "portable" ones that don't require any installation --- just download and run.

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

#468

Post by tantalor »

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…

> only a few KB in size, a single binary, and that same binary will work across 25 years of OS versions

A few kb for the binary + 20-40 gb for the OS with 25 years of backwards compatibility

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

#469

Post by eyegor »

_bxg1 wrote: post #414
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…

In my experience Java GUIs are consistently even more laggy and unresponsive than Electron apps. They may be lighter in terms of memory, but they never feel lighter. Even IntelliJ and family - supposedly the state of the art in Java apps - feel like mud on a brand-new 16" Macbook Pro.

Interestingly they seem to run exactly the same on horribly low spec machines. I blame the jvm's love for boxing and unboxing everything in IL land. Of course by now I'd hope it's less wasteful - last I spent serious time in Java was 2015.

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

#470

Post by eyegor »

outside1234 wrote: post #369
AsyncAwait wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qt may not 'look' native, but it has native performance, whereas Electron really doesn't.

VSCode is indistinguishable from native, so not sure its Electron that's at fault here.

If I recall correctly, Microsoft forked their own version of electron to make vs code feel more snappy. Because normal electron runs like slack.
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