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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?

#551

Post by jotm »

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…

Most of those have nothing to do with OP's point, which is that some software uses way too much processing power than it should.

While on the topic, let's remember the speech recognition software available for Windows (and some for Android 2.x) that was completely offline and could be voice activated with, gasp, any command!

Google with its massive data centers can only do "OK/Hey Google". Riiight. I can't believe there are actually apologists for this bs.

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

#552

Post by riquito »

smileysteve wrote: post #494
thrower123 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You live in a bubble, Windows still dominates desktop (obviously, most people can't afford a Mac and the year of Linux on desktop has not come yet)

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

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

#553

Post by jotm »

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.

I still use Winamp for offline music. Nothing else is faster.

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

#554

Post by jotm »

isignal wrote: post #495
userbinator wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mixed plus whichever feed you request to enlarge sounds more reasonable.

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

#555

Post by liendolucas »

adrianN wrote: post #521
zelly wrote: post #520

I'm going to take the contrarian position here and say No, there is no place for native desktop apps. If a user has enough resources to run a graphical operating system, then they have enough resources for an extra copy of Chromium. The exception to this is something either so simple that it only has one button (e.g. some file format converter) or so large (e.g. Photoshop, Bloomberg, AutoCAD, Mathematica, Visual Stud…

Maybe your native editors just suck. There are many people who have older hardware. For example I write this on a 2009 Macbook. My parents use older hardware still. And we're relatively well-off in a rich western country. These machines are perfectly fine to use for almost all tasks, but they're not powerful enough to run ten copies of Chrome. We might easily be able to afford that newer 500€ laptop, but for many peo…

And also sometimes there is absolutely no need to buy new hardware! I find appalling that we need to upgrade our machines just because software gets more and more resource hungry. My parents as well use old hardware to browse, edit documents and write emails. Back at I home I still run a 10 year old PC with Linux and it just keeps running very well... No need to upgrade! I just think about the golden age of videogames and the software tricks developers came up with to make them run and the hardware those used to run on. Today basically you need to constantly upgrade your GPU if you want to play the latest cool game. Ridiculous.

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

#556

Post by hoseja »

irishcoffee wrote: post #368
jcelerier wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a few reasons : - Qt is actually the native toolkit of multiple operating systems (Jolla for instance and KDE Plasma) - you just need to have a Linux kernel running and it handles the rest. It also does the effort of going to look for the user theme for widgets to mix in with the rest of the platform, while web apps completely disregard that. - Windows has at least 4 different UI toolkits now which all render kinda d…

Knowing what I know about Qt and what I've done with it in my day job, it's basically the best kept secret on hn. What they're doing with 6+licensing... I'm not sure how I feel, but from a pure multi-platform framework it really is the bees knees. I've taken c++ qt desktop apps that never had any intention of running on a phone, built them, ran them, everything "just worked. I was impressed.

I just wish it weren't stuck, anisotropically, ~10 years in the past. Maybe Qt6 will be better, but more likely it will be more and more QML.

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

#557

Post by alexchamberlain »

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 guess the question becomes: what is the native ecosystem missing that means devs are choosing to deliver memory/CPU hungry apps, rather than small efficient ones?

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

#558

Post by fomine3 »

entha_saava wrote: post #487
manquer wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the browser is computationally expensive abstraction, so is the various .NET SDKs, the OS, custom compiler and the higher language of your choice. Yes there were days were an game like prince of persia could be fit in to the memory of apple IIe and all of it including the sound graphics, mechanics and the asset was less than 1.1 MB ! However the effort required to write such efficient code, hand optimise compiler…

I use windows (although not a heavy user, I mainly use Linux these days), and only outsider apps I have installed are lightweight open source ones and some "official" versions of software. You don't need an antivirus apart from built-in Windows Defender. And I don't notice any slowdown. I have a non-admin account which I regularly use and admin account is separate. Arguably many users don't know how to use a Windows…

You already can use UWP that has sandbox. Win32 apps can be converted to it. So no one cares about more security. Most vendor stuck at "just work" Win32.

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

#559

Post by jcelerier »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #425
jcelerier wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not really accurate. Qt relies on a lower level windowing system (X Window, Wayland, Cocoa, win32 etc. etc.). Qt also supports rendering directly on the GPU (or with software rendering on the framebuffer) without any windowing system such as X11 or Wayland - that's likely how it is most commonly used in the wild, as that's one of the main way to use it on embedded devices.

I'd like to see it do that on macOS ... You're seriously suggesting that the common use of Qt on Linux systems is direct rendering without the windowing system?

Well, yes. I can't tell too much because of NDAs but if you go buy a recent car there is a good chance that all the screens are rendered with Qt on Linux or a RTOS - there is likely more of those than desktop linux users as much as this saddens me

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

#560

Post by jcelerier »

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.

Thanks for the info, gonna check.. we already have a cert, no clue what's missing precisely in the config, how can I try ?
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