471–480 of 777 posts
Wasn't Steve Jobs' idea to have Web Apps for Iphone but Iphone team talked him into native apps for various reasons such as performance and security and he finally gave in. I would assume the same for desktop versus web apps but as time goes on I think web apps will prevail.
The original iPhone didn't even have a call log.
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FWIW i do not remember having issues like that, i had mIRC practically always open, a web browser, email application, etc and i do not remember ever having networking issues. Internet was slow but that was largely because for the most part of the 90s i was stuck with a very slow 2400 baud modem - i got to appreciate the option that browsers had to not download images by default :-P. But in general i do not remember b…
Me neither, I'm not going to lie and say that I had 40 applications opened, but I DID have 5-10 apps using the web with 0 issues (A browser+IRC App + Email Client+MICQ+MSN Messenger+Kazaam/Napster+Winamp in stream mode). Very very few of the web and desktop applications of today are as snappy and user-friendly as classic Winamp.
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…
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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.
Code reusability between browser/desktop/mobile is one. Easier to find developers, faster development speed due to ecosystem, previous experience/familiarity etc. I guess.
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As an Electron hater, I’m constantly surprised at just how much VS Code doesn’t suck.
It doesn't suck, but try Jetbrains IDEs. C++ and other "not JS" language support is vastly superior including refactoring that actually works.
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…
I think you'll also find that the typical non-technical users simply don't care whether or not Electron is powering a piece of software. They just want something that looks modern and works "well enough".
- Marked (Markdown previewer/converter): native.
- Transmit (file transfer): native.
- PDF Expert: native.
- ImageOptim (image optimizer): native.
- Fantastical: native.
- MailMate: native.
- Terminal: native.
- iA Writer: native.
- Safari: native.
- CodeKit: native.
- Dash: native.
- GitUp (GUI Git client): native.
- 1Password: native.
- Telegram: Electron.
And a few that aren't running now but I run very often:
- Slack: Electron.
- Visual Studio Code: Electron.
- BBEdit: native.
- Nova[1]: native.
- MacVim: reply hazy, ask again later[2].
So, I mean, I can't speak for everyone, but it doesn't seem to me like native apps are going away in the near future, at least.
[1]: Nova is a still-in-beta code editor I'm trying out as a possible replacement for VS Code. Code still "wins" on features for me, but Nova is pretty cool, and still in beta, so...?
[2] I mean, MacVim is a native "GUI," but it's, you know, Vim.
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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.
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…
Except for the 25 years support, you can get the same features if an electron runtime was introduced and you avoid using too many libraries from npm. In most electron apps, most bloat is caused by the bundled runtime instead of the app itself. See my breakdown from a year ago of an electron based color picker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19652749