51–58 of 58 posts
If you want to write to MFC, which I'm sure would make the most sense, then that's probably your problem.
You actually have something against MFC? You realise that MFC is a pretty thin wrapper around the Windows API, right?
And I like wxWidgets. So, sue me.
Compiled, non cross platform, download-only, "client software"... no. Cross platform, deployable on the web or any OS desktop, or mobile phones (with new generation browsers)... yes. But we had to write an entire framework first ;)
The problem with finding really great hackers who want to do client-side coding is that a huge percentage of the work required to implement such apps is boring crap: compatibility testing, look-and-feel review, installer authoring, and collection of client configurations from issue reports. You can implement more features in less time when you deliver thin-client solutions. Also, the knowledge required to deploy apps…
A huge percentage of the work required to implement web apps is boring crap: browser testing, working around bugs for quirks in different browsers, look and feel review, screwing around with stuff in five different languages / formats just to do something trivial (i.e. Javascript, CSS, HTML, Python, SQL) ... I really don't think there are many web developers that can pound out an interactive web GUI with the speed th…
That being said, I don't think it's fair to argue that desktop apps are easier to develop, test, and deploy than their online counterparts. Furthermore, information-sharing features that are trivial to implement via the web can be rather more complicated to build into a desktop tool.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A huge percentage of the work required to implement web apps is boring crap: browser testing, working around bugs for quirks in different browsers, look and feel review, screwing around with stuff in five different languages / formats just to do something trivial (i.e. Javascript, CSS, HTML, Python, SQL) ... I really don't think there are many web developers that can pound out an interactive web GUI with the speed th…
You're right, of course; doing full-stack development, no matter the target platform, involves a lot of unsexy busywork. Browser incompatibilities are an issue as well, and there are certainly a number of layers of technology beneath any finished application. That being said, I don't think it's fair to argue that desktop apps are easier to develop, test, and deploy than their online counterparts. Furthermore, informa…
To tie this back to the original topic: great desktop hackers can throw together desktop apps quickly, and know the quirks for developing cross platform (just like great web hackers know browser quirks). In contrast to most of the crowd here, I'm pretty darn good at desktop (and server / systems) programming, and mediocre at web programming, so I just see the other side of the coin.
So in short, make sure you do several usability studies with people who fit your market segment.
I've written a shareware app with a good GUI. I am not interested in working on it or any desktop app. Xobni is the only YC company I've heard of where the primary product or solution is a desktop app, so I think YCombinator also prefers web based apps. By the way, I've always wondered--is there a feature in your product that monitors how often you mention RescueTime on news.YC and elsewhere? If there's not, or if it…
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%... http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+r... Looks like 66 of the 481 pages with the word RescueTime somewhere on them have my username somewhere on the page. I imagine many of those are assorted duplicate views of the same comment and many more are threads where one person mentioned RT and I responded. Feel free to sort thru the times…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You actually have something against MFC? You realise that MFC is a pretty thin wrapper around the Windows API, right?
Well, I do actually hate the WORD/DWORD stuff in MFC/Win32. And I like wxWidgets. So, sue me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%... http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+r... Looks like 66 of the 481 pages with the word RescueTime somewhere on them have my username somewhere on the page. I imagine many of those are assorted duplicate views of the same comment and many more are threads where one person mentioned RT and I responded. Feel free to sort thru the times…
Respectfully, I'm not going to go through your comments; I'm just going by what I remember reading over the past year. (By the way, I don't think that mentioning your company as often as possible is necessarily a bad thing, as I had alluded to in the parent post.) If you think that's a reasonable measure, though, go through my comments and find where I have ever been a troll before calling me that. I'd expected more…