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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?

#611

Post by slightwinder »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #219
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…

VS Code is slow at basic things like having characters show up on screen after hitting the key. It's good at everything else though so that lag doesn't matter as much.

On a real system or just in some syntetic benchmark? Because for me it looks quite fast in barfing out characters.

At least in base-mode. It can becoming slower when the IDE-features kicks in and autocomplete needs some time to meditate about the stae of it's world. But this also scales with size of your active sourcecode, the codebase and used language.

Also, this is some problem of all IDEs, not exclusive with VS Code.

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

#612

Post by elbear »

jcelerier wrote: post #560
1cvmask wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Configure your HTTP server to serve that subdomain from HTTPS. Here's an example using nginx:

https://linuxize.com/post/redirect-http-to-https-in-nginx/

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

#613

Post by samanator »

hermitcrab wrote: post #79

Yes, I hope so. I have just released a new data transformation/ETL tool for the desktop (Qt/C++ app for Mac and Windows). The advantages of desktop are: -performance/low latency -richer UI (e.g. shortcuts) -privacy But there are trade-offs: -the user has to install/upgrade it -less insight into what the user is doing -harder to sell as a subscription I wrote this in 2013 and I think it is still mostly true: 'Is deskt…

Cool article!

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

#614

Post by saagarjha »

tjoff wrote: post #539
mlwiese wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is movement away from stop-the-world GC, but not to reference counting. The movement is towards better GC. The language Go has sub millisecond GC with multi-GB heaps since 2018. See https://blog.golang.org/ismmkeynote Java is also making good progress on low latency GC. Reference counting can be slower than GC if you are using thread safe refcounts which have to be updated atomically. I don't want to have to th…

Yet we still read articles and threads about how bad the Go GC is and the tradeoffs that it forces upon you. I get the feeling that the industry is finally starting to realize that GC has been a massive mistake. Memory management is a very important part of an application, if you outsource that to a GC you stop to think about it. And if you don't think about memory management you are guaranteed to end up with a slow…

I don’t think it’s fair to call garbage collection a mistake. Sure, it has properties that make it ill-suited for certain applications, but it is convenient and well suited for many others.

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

#615

Post by saagarjha »

tantalor wrote: post #468
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…

> only a few KB in size, a single binary, and that same binary will work across 25 years of OS versions A few kb for the binary + 20-40 gb for the OS with 25 years of backwards compatibility

The actual part of the OS providing that is a small fraction of the number you quoted.

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

#616

Post by Piskvorrr »

Insanity wrote: post #572
thdrdt wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you don't mind me asking, how much RAM did you have before, and what did you upgrade to? I recently got a new PC myself and decided to go for 16GB, my previous one (about a decade old) had 8GB and I didn't feel I really hit the limit, but wanted to be future proof. Because as you said, a lot of 'modern' applications are taking up a lot of memory.

I also went from 8GB to 16GB recently (virtual machines are hungry); but I had gotten rid of Slack even before that. I mean, yes, it has round edges and goes ping and has all those cutesy animations - but 2GB of RAM for a glorified IRC client, excuse me, what exactly is it doing with billions of bytes worth of memory? ("Don't know, don't care" seems to be its developers' mantra)

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

#617

Post by saagarjha »

nv-vn wrote: post #516
_bxg1 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've definitely noticed the same on IntelliJ but weirdly enough Eclipse feels just fine. IIRC both are written in Java, so maybe it comes down to the design of IntelliJ moreso than the limitations of the JVM?

Eclipse interestingly uses native controls which it hooks up to Java, while IntelliJ draws everything essentially.

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

#618

Post by saagarjha »

cglong wrote: post #440
wolco wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say web platform do you mean a browser? Using a browser is the mosted optimised and performant over installing an application on your desktop? Curious what desktop do you run your browser under? I would give you an example of a simple video split application. A web platform requires uploading, downloading and slow processing. A local app would be hours quicker as the data is local.

No reason a video splitting app couldn't be written with client-side JS.

That sounds like it’d probably be slow.

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

#619

Post by saagarjha »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #352
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…

This is not really accurate. Qt relies on a lower level windowing system (X Window, Wayland, Cocoa, win32 etc. etc.). Also worth noting that many creation-centric applications for the desktop (graphics, audio, video etc. etc.) don't look "native" even when they actually are. In one case (Logic Pro, from Apple), the "platform leading app from the platform creator" doesn't even look native!

On macOS Qt doesn’t really use Cocoa, it use Quartz/CoreGraphics (the drawing rather than the application layer). Note that Apple’s pro apps are native controls with a UI theme: they usually behave like their unthemed counterparts.

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

#620

Post by saagarjha »

madeofpalk wrote: post #450
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not platform-provided in my experience, but browser provided. The result of when viewed in a browser on macOS has no relation to the Cocoa API in any meaningful sense.

I'm pretty sure that when you render just a in at least Safari, the browser will render a native Cocoa button control. If you set a CSS property like background colour or change the border, then it will "fall back" to a custom rendered control that isn't from the OS UI. I did a small bit of research into this, and found plenty of "anecdotal" evidence, but nothing confirming for sure. I'm looking and interacting with…

The drawing is native and the interaction is handled by the browser.
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