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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?

#691

Post by sgift »

eldavido wrote: post #422
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…

I think the other major, major thing people discount is the emergence of viable sandboxed installs/uninstalls, and the accompanying software distribution via app stores. Windows 95 never had a proper, operating-system supported package manager, and I think that's a big part of why web applications took off in the late 90s/early 2000s. There simply wasn't any guarantee that once you installed a native app, you could e…

IMHO web applications took off because developers learned pretty fast how useful "I can update any time without user consent" is, especially when your software is a buggy mess (or a "MVP" if you like buzzwords) and you need to update every five minutes.

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

#693

Post by yrio »

kokizzu wrote: post #238

this just like asking: do you prefer to use native/high performance applications? yes do you like developing native application? no if the performance and memory usage of web app already equal to native desktop app, which do you prefer to use? web XD

You also don't like developing web frontends, you only like developing backends & games :p

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

#694

Post by jschwartzi »

arvinsim wrote: post #672
gindely wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But now I had to upgrade my RAM. But I can't. My ram is soldered on. How many tons of carbon dioxide should I emit so that you can use React? There are ways to do declarative ui/state management without dom...

If carbon footprint is that important to you, maybe you should find ways to encourage companies not to solder on RAM instead.

Why not both?

My computer still computes with 2 GB of ram. It’s just that developers are gluing more and more stuff together to do things we did on Pentium processors with 64 MB of ram.

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

#695

Post by Groxx »

api wrote: post #682
thrower123 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webstorm or PyCharm isn't as good as IntelliJ or ReSharper, but holy hell is it better than just a text editor, even emacs. I really don't understand why so many programmers proudly proclaim that they do things the hard way and wear that as a badge of honor.

That's an old, old trope. "Real men" do it the way that takes 3X as long and yields code with more bugs.

I feel like "tool use" follows roughly the same curve as a Gartner Hype Cycle, but without an upper bound on the right (as it implies a below-peak asymptote).

In the very beginning, less is often better, since the tool is prompting you with too many things you don't understand. Then you get past that point and you're massively more productive, since it's catching all your simple mistakes. Then you become disillusioned since it doesn't catch all mistakes, and you start learning in detail how it has failed you, and you just (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ the whole thing (the "real man" trough). And in the end you go back to sophisticated tools, as you realize a 70% solution can still give you magnitudes more productivity.

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

#696

Post by fragmede »

gindely wrote: post #678
quantummkv wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that isn't what's missing. It's a restatement of the problem. DOM based apps are much more resource intensive than native. What is missing from native that makes business choose DOM? If there was some modern tool like WxWidgets that supported modern apis like DOM, Android and UWP, would we see more use of native? Electron would therefore become pointless.

That is what's missing, albiet tersely stated.

The hypothetical business has two choices. Choose Electron, or choose some other toolkit that has native, cross-platform support (like Qt). It's far easier for the business, and the developers there, to take their existing website HTML, CSS, and Javascript; and simply wrap it in Electron (which costs $0), and call it a day. Every other choice is (perceived as being) more expensive.

Qt is a modern toolkit with native-cross platform support, but costs money for commercial use, and businesses and software developers don't want to spend the money on it.

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

#697

Post by kingosticks »

neutronicus wrote: post #639
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Newbo…

I find it hard to believe at least some of that that data wasn't cached on your device. Setting a track to be downloaded just means the cached data is evicted differently. If you run their desktop client with logging enabled you'll see this happening and I'd say it's likely to be the same across platforms. That is of course the actual reason they have a non-native app - to reuse the codebase and save money.

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

#698

Post by LgWoodenBadger »

_bxg1 wrote: post #414
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…

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.

If that's the case regarding IntelliJ then you probably haven't changed the jvm heap size, which is defaulted to something very small (2GB maybe) by IntelliJ.

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

#699

Post by gimboland »

psds2 wrote: post #212
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…

VSCode, because of electron, doesn't allow you to have multiple windows that share state while working on a project. This makes it terrible with multiple screens.

That's basically the whole reason I'm sticking with PyCharm these days. Apart from that VSCode seems to tick all my boxes, but it's a deal-breaker for me. There's some kludgey workaround possible involving workspaces but it's rubbish.

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

#700

Post by entha_saava »

fomine3 wrote: post #558
entha_saava wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it possible to run a process (and its children processes) in sandbox manually with only given permissions?
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