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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?

#661

Post by jcelerier »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #655
ljm wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really surprised me when I downloaded Godot only to get a 32MB binary. Snappy as hell. Web apps masquerading as desktop apps are terribly slow and it's a surprise we've got so used to it. My slack client takes a few seconds to launch, then it has a loading screen, and quite often it will refresh itself (blanking out the screen and doing a full-blown re-render) without warning. This is before it starts spinning the…

It's interesting to compare Ripcord[0] to Slack. Ripcord is a third-party desktop client for Slack and Discord. It has something like 80% of features of the official Slack client and a simpler UI (arguably better, more information-dense), but it's also a good two orders of magnitude lighter and snappier. And it also handles Discord at the same time . -- [0] - https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

and is written by a single person, in Qt

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

#662

Post by TeMPOraL »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #550
cambalache wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's an artifact of IP laws. The reason you don't have to curate your own mp3s again is because some service managed to find a way to give you a searchable, streamable collection of music that's also legal. But that in no way implies Spotify needs to be so bloated.

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

#663

Post by bullen »

In the short term 3D MMO's are desktop only. In the long term everything goes back to being desktop because the abstractions waste energy. Everything beyond vanilla HTML + CSS + .js for GUI is going away!

I'm also going to burn some karma and re-iterate that there are only two languages worth using: JavaSE on the server (build everything yourself) and C(++) on the client. We need this to be understood so that fragmentation can be reduced!

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

#664

Post by pjmlp »

roca wrote: post #648
pjmlp wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not manually memory management though, and it also comes with its own set of issues, like everyone that was tried to write GUIs or games in Rust is painfully aware of. There is no free lunch no matter what one picks.

That's true. The comment by mlwiese up-thread, that I responded to, praised Go's low GC latency without mentioning the heavy memory and throughput overheads that come with it. I felt it worth pointing out the lack of a free lunch there; I think a lot of casual Go observers and users aren't aware of it.

Agreed, although if Go had proper support for explicit value types (instead of relying in escape analysis) and generics, like e.g. D, Nim, that could be improved.

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

#665

Post by TeMPOraL »

fxtentacle wrote: post #644
nv-vn wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We gave it up for slightly higher profit margins enabled by hiring slightly less qualified programmers at a slightly lower rate. In a similar vein, Industrial Light and Magic used to have a few highly talented people crafting incredibly intelligent solutions to make their movies possible: https://youtu.be/AtPA6nIBs5g By now, most of those effects would instead be done using CGI and outsourced to Asia.

There's probably a long rant waiting to be written on this topic. Myself, I've observed how over the last four decades, CGI effects went from worthless, through novelty, through increasingly awesome, all the way to "cheapest garbage that can be made that looks convincing enough when the camera is moving very fast".

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

#667

Post by TeMPOraL »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #443
StillBored wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said that 20 years ago, but so far I've been proven completely wrong. Skype/etc just keep getting bigger and slower despite, from what I can tell adding absolutely no additional functionality. In fact if you consider it can't seem to do peer to peer anymore, its lost features. Very few companies are rewritting their electron apps in win32 (although they should be). Instead it continues moving in that direction, or…

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…

> who cares if Discord or a browser's HN tab aren't optimally efficient? You're just going to suck it up and use it. With this in mind, a lot of the native app discussion is technical superiority circlejerk.

People who use it. "Suck it up" isn't the correct answer, and it only happens because software is an incredibly non-competitive space.

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

#668

Post by swalsh »

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…

Something I noticed over my career. Programmers tend to get super beefy machines. My machine has 64GB of memory, and 12 cores. But the typical users who use our software don't have anywhere near those same specs.. but programmers often just say "it worked on my machine" without thought about the specs.

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

#669

Post by grishka »

userbinator wrote: post #462
Decade wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> videoconferencing would more commonly use 320x240 or 352x288 which has 1/4 the pixels, and H261 or H263 instead as the codec.

Modern videoconferencing solutions (WebRTC) usually use 1280x720 and either H264 or VP8. Some apparently use HEVC. Also most modern processors and SoCs come with hardware-accelerated codecs built in, so most of the work related to compression isn't even done by the CPU itself.

> I'm not familiar with Zoom as I don't use it, but it's very likely you're not actually receiving and decoding 16 separate video streams

Yes you are receiving separate streams.

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