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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?

#541

Post by pmontra »

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…

> [the absence of a package manager was] a big part of why web applications took off in the late 90s/early 2000s.

Of course apt-get is very convenient but I can't see a Microsoft version of it letting companies deliver multiple daily updates.

Based on my experience of the time the reasons were, in random order

- HTML GUIs were less functional but easier to code and good enough for most problems

- we could deploy many times per day for all our customers

- we could use Java on the backend and people didn't have to install the JVM on their PCs

- it worked on Windows and Macs, palmtops (does anybody remember them?) and anything else

- it was very easy to make it access our internal database

- a single component inside the firewall generates the GUI and accesses the db instead of a frontend and a backend, which by the way is the modern approach (but it costs more and we didn't have the extra functionality back then, js was little more than cosmetic)

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

#542

Post by thdrdt »

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…

I recently had to upgrade my RAM because I have Spotify and Slack open all the time. Today RAM is cheap but it is crazy those programs take up so much resources.

Another program I use a lot is Blender (3D software). Compared to Spotify and Slack it is a crazy complicated program with loads of complicated functionalities. But it starts in a blink and only uses resources when it needs to (calculations and your 3D model).

So I absolutely agree with you.

I also think it has to do with the fact that older programmers now more about the cost of resources than younger programmers do. We used computers without harddisk and KBs of RAM. I always have this in my mind while programming.

The younger programmers may be right that resources don't matter much because they are cheap and available. But now I had to upgrade my RAM.

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

#543

Post by ahmedbaracat »

nikivi wrote: post #299
ahmedbaracat wrote: post #286

I am constantly annoyed by the web apps, not only because they consume so much resources, but because of the noticeable UI lag that drives me crazy. For example, I have been entertaining the idea recently of building a native Todo app for macOS because of how slow Todoist has become in the past few years.

I'd check https://www.2doapp.com It's super fast and featureful

Thanks for the suggestion. Looks very interesting, but a bit expensive. Looking to see if there is a trial somewhere...

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

#544

Post by sime2009 »

digi59404 wrote: post #280
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…

Both VS Code and Atom use significant amounts of WebAssembly and low level libraries to achieve that performance. In addition to that they've written their own view layer for an IDE in modern JS which makes it more performant and stable. I despise electron and html-wrapper apps. But I gotta give credit where it's due. VS Code is pretty good. With the advent of the new WinUI, React+Native on Windows, and Blazer. I'm b…

> Both VS Code and Atom use significant amounts of WebAssembly and low level libraries to achieve that performance.

Atom has some internal data structures written in C++. VSCode uses a native executable to do the file search, but no further low level magic is used to make it go fast.

I don't think any of them are using WebAssembly yet.

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

#545

Post by ironmagma »

I crave native apps, especially ones that get out of the way. Web apps take up screen real estate, and are cumbersome if they involve login details or if you want to access the API (if one even exists). There is definitely a place for more native apps, and more creative designs as well. Creatively, I am always seeking inspiration, and web apps are just the same design patterns repeated everywhere. A fresh app like TweetBot or OmniFocus is valuable for its creativity and sleekness, it's just something you could never find in a web application.

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

#546

Post by roca »

pjmlp wrote: post #538
roca wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go achieves those low pause times by allocating 2x memory to the heap than it's actually using. There's no free lunch with GC.

Same applies with manually memory management, you get instead slower allocators unless you replace the standard library with something else, and the joy of tracking down double frees and memory leaks.

I'm using Rust, so no double frees and no accidental forgetting to call free(). Of course you can still have memory leaks, but that's true in GC languages too.

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

#547

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

thdrdt wrote: post #542
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…

I recently had to upgrade my RAM because I have Spotify and Slack open all the time. Today RAM is cheap but it is crazy those programs take up so much resources. Another program I use a lot is Blender (3D software). Compared to Spotify and Slack it is a crazy complicated program with loads of complicated functionalities. But it starts in a blink and only uses resources when it needs to (calculations and your 3D model…

I like to imagine 20 years in the future we’ll see articles posted on HN, or whatever the cool kids are reading by then ;)

... articles with titles like:

“Slack in one Ruby statement” a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208431

More seriously though, Spotify and Slack are optimised to intentionally be huge time wasters, so it makes sense the organisations that produce them don’t care about performance / efficiency.

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

#548

Post by mb_72 »

fbelzile wrote: post #124

I make a living developing software only available on Windows and macOS. That said, if I didn't need to interact so much with the operating system, I'd be making a web app. It all depends on what you want to make though. Video editing software? Native app. CRUD app? Web app. You may also want to consider pricing implications of both. Desktop software can usually be sold for a higher up front cost, but it's tough sell…

Great to read about someone in a similar situation to me. I work as the developer and maintainer of a niche-market financial / real-estate application. This application has been developed and supported since the late 80s, first being done in Turbo Pascal, then Delphi, and then under my stewardship we moved to C#. I refactored the calculation and report production code into a library, and since that time we've built a Mac version and Web version, all utilising the same 'core' library. This means that for critical calculations and data output we - my business partner, who is the 'domain brains', and I - can do all the hard work on the Windows version (with which we are most familiar and comfortable, and IMO VS on Windows is still miles ahead of VS on Mac), and then 'just' do the GUI work for the other versions.

We did look at doing exactly as you said, i.e. using a web view within Windows and Mac, however I couldn't really get things working well enough at the time (as TBH I am bit of a noob WRT web development, and just pick things up as necessary as we go along).

For our market, there is strong demand for the desktop versions, and this is even with a subscription model; people get access to the most recent major and minor versions of the software as well as phone and email support while under subscription. When their sub runs out they are entitled to minor version updates, but nothing else. My biz partner is very good with people and very knowledgeable in the domain we operate, so this kind of arrangement suits everybody. Oh, and I get to work remote, and have done with him for ~15 years. The current situation really makes one appreciate fortunate arrangements such as this.

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

#549

Post by jbverschoor »

ttoinou wrote: post #48
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #27

Every single app that I use, I try and make sure it is native. I shun electron apps at all cost. It's because people who put in effort to use the native APIs put in a lot more effort in the app in general based on my anecdotal evidence. It is also more performant and smaller in size, things that I cherish. It also pays homage to limits and striving to come up with new ways of overcoming them, which hackers would have…

1 gig for Slack ? I count And currently taking < 300 MB RAM

"storage is cheap"

"memory are cheap"

"cpus are cheap"

Say the same people who spend a million on AWS every year

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

#550

Post by marcus_holmes »

cambalache wrote: post #454
badsectoracula wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet, people stopped using it.

I used to use it all the time. Now I use Spotify instead. I'm not sure I want to go back to curating my own collection of mp3's again.

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