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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?

#631

Post by quantummkv »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #557
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…

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?

HTML, CSS and Javascript. Most of these electron apps are basically wrappers around actual websites to give a place in the dock and show notifications and access the filesystem.

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

#632

Post by jcelerier »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #594
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…

> Similarly, I predict we will see an uptick in popularity of actually native frameworks such as Qt over Electron for the same reason. I would predict that if only Qt didn't cost a mind-boggling price for non-GPL apps. They should really switch to pay-as-you-earn e.g. like the Unreal engine so people would only have to start paying as they start earning serious money selling the actual app. If they don't Qt popularit…

Qt through the LGPL license is free for non-GPL apps. Tesla is using it as LGPL in their cars without paying a dime to Qt Company (which is, imho, super shitty given the amount of money they make).

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

#633

Post by tomsmeding »

thdrdt wrote: post #577
Insanity wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 upgraded from 8 to 16GB. But I'm in the process of ordering a new desktop that will have 32GB. Spotify and Slack are not problematic as individual programs but since I have a lot of other programs open they are the ones that take up more memory than they should. I mean: Spotify is just a music player. Why does it need 250MB RAM?

Because it is not just a music player. It plays music, aside from giving you an entire experience that consists of connecting with your friends, managing your music library, consuming ads, having a constant connection with the server, and ...

This was meant to be sarcastic, but I'm not even sure how to continue. Maybe someone else can bulk up that list to get to something that requires 250MB. :)

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

#634

Post by p0nce »

burke wrote: post #150
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…

As an Electron hater, I’m constantly surprised at just how much VS Code doesn’t suck.

As a Visual Studio user, I can't get into VS Code. For once, the interface moves constantly. Things resize at all times. It feels sluggish, however Visual Studio is becoming also worse so in the end VS Code end up feeling quicker... VS Code feels _very far_ from Sublime Text usability to me.

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

#635

Post by p0nce »

noahtallen wrote: post #326
heywire wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love vs code, and its plugin system, but if I’m on my laptop without a charger, I use something else. When I’m running vs code, my battery life is cut nearly in half.

What do you use instead? In my experience, normal IDEs (Android Studio, Xcode, Visual Studio) all perform worse than VS Code in terms of memory use and battery. :/

Not old versions of Visual Studio.

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

#637

Post by Piskvorrr »

userbinator wrote: post #464
hombre_fatal wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a way for end-users to actually make judgements about application efficiency, there will never be any real pressure to make efficient, native apps. Though the only measurement I think people would actually care about is battery impact, and even that is pretty much hidden away on phones except to the few people who actually look. But the other problem is: who cares if Discord or a browser's HN tab aren't optim…

Without a way for end-users to actually make judgements about application efficiency, there will never be any real pressure to make efficient, native apps. I'd say it's more of a "without a way for end-users to compare " --- the average user has no idea how much computing resources are necessary, so if they see their email client taking 15 seconds to load an email and using several GB of RAM, they won't know any bett…

THIS. I do remember outright revelations in user experience, as I showed people how much better Firefox 2.0 was, compared to IE6 (and looking back, version 2.0 wasn't all that wonderful, from present point of view - tells you more about IE than about FF).

edit: it was 2.0, I misremembered.

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

#638

Post by quietbritishjim »

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 also think it has to do with the fact that older programmers now more about the cost of resources than younger programmers do.

I'm not convinced it's the programmers driving these decisions. Assuming that it takes less developer effort - even just a little - to implement an inefficient desktop application, it comes down to a business decision (assuming these are programs created by businesses, which Spotify and Slack are). The decision hinges on whether the extra cost results in extra income or reduced cost elsewhere. In practice people still use these programs so it seems the reduced income is minimal. What's more, the "extra cost" of a more efficient program is not just extra expense spent on developers - it's hard to hire developers so you probably wouldn't just hire an extra developer or two and get the same feature set with greater efficiency. Instead, that "extra cost" is an oppotunity cost: a reduced rate of implementing functionality.

In other words, so long as consumers prioritise functionality over the efficiency of the program, it makes good business sense for you to prioritise that too. I'm not saying that I agree with it, but it's how the market works.

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

#639

Post by neutronicus »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #547
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…

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 / effici…

Most Spotify user-hours are probably office workers or students pumping music into headphones while working. If anything it's a productivity application because it trades flagrantly unnecessary resource usage (streaming the same songs over and over) for users' time (no more dicking around crafting the perfect iPod).

On the topic of flagrantly unnecessary resource usage...

My first child was born six months ago. Newborns (we discovered) sleep better with white noise. So of course we found a three hour white noise track on Spotify and played it from our phones for every nap, never bothering to download it.

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

#640

Post by neutronicus »

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 work on a desktop CAD / CAM application, and I need every one of the 12 cores and 32 GB RAM on my windows workstation. I know this because I also have a mac workstation with lower specs (16 GB RAM, don't know offhand how many cores) and developing on it is intolerable (let's play "wait an hour to see if clang will compile my changes" - I know, I know, I should read the C++ standard more carefully so I'm not disappointed to discover that MSVC was overly permissive).

Parenthetically, we do use Slack and I am double-dipping on a lot of heavy functionality by having both Spacemacs (which I use for code editing and navigating / search within files) and Visual Studio (which I use for building, debugging, and jump-to-definition) open at the same time.

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