621–630 of 777 posts
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Google Docs actually hijacks CMD+F.
And nowadays even websites that don't hijack the shortcut itself are non-"find in page"-able, due to the trick of disposing unused/out-of-view components (which is actually I suspect what Docs is doing, too, but they made their own find so people wouldn't get stuck)
Though, I think Google Docs is not a canvas app.
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…
The " is cheap" mantra also really only makes sense if you are writing server code, where you yourself pay for all the memory your code will ever use. If you deploy code to a large number of users it makes little sense. If a million users start your app daily, and your app has a 5 second load time and uses 300mb of ram, you are wasting over 50 days of user time, and hogging close to 300 terabytes of ram.
We have customers who requires servers with 64GB+ memory, of single applications. This is running on VMs in VMWare. If a ESXi host crashes, you'd want VMWare to migrate your VM to another ESXi host, but that becomes somewhat tricky if you need to locate one with 64GB of available memory. Unless of cause you're way over-provisioned, which is actually pretty expensive. More realistically VMWare will start moving a ton of VMs around to put all those with little memory usage on other hosts, in an attempt to find 64GB for your VM. This takes time.
It can be difficult to explain to people that really this should look at their memory consumption, if nothing else to plan for fail-over.
I will come at this from a different, philosophical perspective: Web apps come from a tradition of engaging the user. This means (first order) to keep people using the app, often with user-hostile strategies: distraction, introducing friction, etc. Native desktop apps come from a tradition of empowering the user. This means enabling the user to accomplish something faster, or with much higher quality. If your app dis…
What a perfect HN reply. Webapp bad. Native good. No justification. Just a bunch of generalizations. Gmail empowers me. Wikipedia empowers me. Github empowers me. Of course native application are important. You don't need to rely on those moralistic justifications.
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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 t…
Voice recognition used by things like Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana, and Alexa usually relies on a "wake word", where it's always listening to you, but only starts processing when it is confident you're talking to it.
Older speech recognition systems were either always listening and processing speech, or only started listening after you pressed a button.
The obvious downside of the older systems is that you can't have them switched on all the time.
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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.
Sure, but if you could have Spotify as is, or a light weight player, like WinAMP, both with equal access to the Spotify service, which would you pick? People aren't using Spotify because the player is fantastic, they use it because Spotify has a huge library, is reasonable price and the player is sort of okay.
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 do webdev mostly and there it's also a matter of management. I want to optimize applications to be less hungry, those are interesting challenges to me. But I've been told by management to just upgrade the server. Either I'd spend a day optimizing, and maybe fixing the issue. Or we just spend 50 euros a month more on a server.
Sometimes the optimization is not worth the effort. For applications like Blender? Optimization means a lot.
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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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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…
It may be true that people are partially looking back in rose-tinted glasses, but there's more than just an inkling of truth to their side. Casey Muratori (game developer for the Witness) has a really good rant [1] about bloat in Visual Studio specifically, where he demonstrates load times & the debugger UI updating today vs on an Pentium 4 running XP. Whether or not you attribute the performance difference to new fe…
I used Visual Studio 6 for years, and yes, I can confirm, it was really that fast.
It's also not true that there were problems with more applications running etc as "Decade" claims. Or to be more precise, there were no problems if one used Windows NT, and I've used NT 3.51, NT 4 and 2000 for development, starting with Windows development even before they were available. And before that, Windows 3.x was indeed less stable, but it is the time before 1995. Note that the first useful web browser was made in 1993, internet as we know it today practically didn't exist. There were networks, but not web.