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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?

#491

Post by ghettoimp »

hootbootscoot wrote: post #133
ghettoimp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree with the idea that lower level is better. Yes, lower-level languages allow for programs with good performance, small executables, and so forth. There are many domains where they are clearly the way to go. But higher-level languages allow for better safety, tremendous productivity, portability, exploration, and flexibility. If you keep your data in an SQL database and you can easily query and updat…

How about "being aware of what your abstraction layers cost, and being palpably aware of every needless contortion you create" know what everything does. call if from up on high? fine, but only if you literally can trace that high level call down to the machine code it emits :D C compiler suites can do that no problem "gcc -S mycode.c" For an appropriate dose of humility, so that you know that I'm not elevating mysel…

The "all things are nails, always use hammers" mentality is almost explicitly what I am arguing against.

My mention of SQL was particularly deliberate. It's an especially successful high level declarative language with clear semantics. Implementations provide sophisticated execution engines for optimizing and efficiently running queries. It is quite a lovely separation of concerns that gives you great flexibility and good performance.

Obviously SQL would be a disastrous choice for, say, storing the pixel data in your video codec. Meanwhile, hand-coded C data structures and algorithms would be a disastrous choice for an inventory management system. Tradeoffs everywhere.

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

#492

Post by offmycloud »

kick wrote: post #102
bhauer wrote: post #29

I prefer well-designed desktop applications to web applications for most things that don't naturally involve the web: * Email clients (I use Thunderbird) * Office suites * Music and media players * Maps * Information managers (e.g., password managers) * Development tools * Personal productivity tools (e.g., to-do lists) * Games As Windows starts on-boarding their unified Electron model (I can't recall what they have…

Thunderbird isn't a native app, for the record. It's a web application similar to an Electron application, but with extra steps.

Last time I looked, Thunderbird was about:

    - 1/3 C/C++
    - 1/3 Javascript
    - 1/3 everything else (XML, CSS, etc) known to humanity

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

#493

Post by codr7 »

I've been going back and forth on this for quite some time. I find that I often end up compromising when choosing an implementation language based on availability of the kind of libraries/UI I want.

What I would really like is to completely separate application logic and UI so I'm free to choose whatever language fits best and potentially add several UIs on top of the same core without being forced to write it in C.

I recently started playing around with the idea of implementing application logic as a separate server that reads/writes a simple line based protocol from/to stdin/out. Simple enough to be tested from a shell, and easy to map to JSON for a web server or drive from a GUI.

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

#494

Post by smileysteve »

thrower123 wrote: post #319
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…

Targeting Windows alone gets you 90% of the desktop market. 95% if you make it run reasonably in Wine. This argument is often used, but it's an excuse. Anything that you need to run on a desktop can't be used effectively on a touch screen anyway, so phones and tablets don't really count for serious software. (Writing this comment is stretching the bounds of what I can reasonably do on an IPhone).

95% of a market that has shrunk nearly 50% over the last decade.

In many ways, the consumer and non specialty business are post desktop. Turns out documents, email, and other communication apps cover 90% of use cases. Anything that requires major performance gets rendered in a cloud and delivered by these other apps.

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

#495

Post by isignal »

userbinator wrote: post #462
Decade wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 adv…

Don’t think it can be an MCU box. You can select an individual stream from the grid to make it larger almost instantly. The individual feeds can display both as grid and a horizontal row. I’m assuming they send individual feeds and the client can ask for feeds at different predefined resolutions.

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

#496

Post by millzlane »

worthless-trash wrote: post #472
cambalache wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It really whipped the llamas ass.

It still does! https://www.winamp.com/

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

#497

Post by postfacto »

burke wrote: post #150
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…

As an Electron hater, I’m constantly surprised at just how much VS Code doesn’t suck.

Anything is capable of not sucking if you go out of your way to spend several man-decades optimizing it.

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

#498

Post by abiogenesis »

1cvmask wrote: post #444
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…

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.

...or just use CloudFlare, which will automatically take care of it.

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

#499

Post by apatheticonion »

Installable web applications are an incredible concept that have saved my customers and myself countless hours (and money).

The experiences are fantastic. The applications look native to the platform, with coloured title bars and OS specific window decorations.

The performance is not noticeably different than the equivalent native experience. I am taking advantage of multi-threading through web workers, web push notifications (sorry iOS), and the (single) code base is maintainable and easy to work with.

I don't see how a GUI framework like QT or several native applications would make a more effective alternative either aesthetically or financially.

I'd consider it uncontested once installable web applications have deeper system access (filesystem, etc).

The addition of web assembly bindings for direct DOM manipulation and directly importing wasm binaries via a script tag would complete the browser as the most sensible customer facing front-end environment.

RE performance, look at Figma.

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

#500

Post by eldavido »

userbinator wrote: post #467
eldavido wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OS API sets have evolved toward more sandboxing. Things are more abstract. Fewer files on disk, more blob-store-like things. Fewer INI files in C:\Windows, more preference stores. No registry keys strewn about. .NET strong naming rather than shoving random DLLs into memory via LoadLibraryA()

(Hi, I'm a windows dev)

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