71–80 of 777 posts
I frequently do light computing on a Surface Go. It's a delightful little device and I love it, but it is not powerful enough that I can leave gmail, Slack, and Discord open all the time.
I don't have enough RAM to run another web application but I could very easily afford a native app or two.
I prefer well-designed desktop applications to web applications for most things that don't naturally involve the web: * Email clients (I use Thunderbird) * Office suites * Music and media players * Maps * Information managers (e.g., password managers) * Development tools * Personal productivity tools (e.g., to-do lists) * Games As Windows starts on-boarding their unified Electron model (I can't recall what they have…
Email doesn't naturally involve the web? What?
The way we use email hasn't really changed that much since the 70s.
Where brute-force performance is a #1 concern I think it diverges. For things like Photoshop filters or rendering, WebAssembly may still be fine (it depends). But for real-time processing that needs timing guarantees or more direct access to hardware (games, DSP, etc.) the code has to be native running in dedicated threads. Still, it would be nice if those operated essentially as native browser plug-ins that still interfaced with a browser environment, rather than a totally separate executable.
I'm seriously ready to let my web browser just be the GUI to my operating system. I want my file manager and terminal and system preferences just to be tabs next to my Gmail and Docs.
I prefer well-designed desktop applications to web applications for most things that don't naturally involve the web: * Email clients (I use Thunderbird) * Office suites * Music and media players * Maps * Information managers (e.g., password managers) * Development tools * Personal productivity tools (e.g., to-do lists) * Games As Windows starts on-boarding their unified Electron model (I can't recall what they have…
Email doesn't naturally involve the web? What?
Email predates the Web, and, imo, has been made much worse by all the Web-adjacent features shoved into it.
I prefer well-designed desktop applications to web applications for most things that don't naturally involve the web: * Email clients (I use Thunderbird) * Office suites * Music and media players * Maps * Information managers (e.g., password managers) * Development tools * Personal productivity tools (e.g., to-do lists) * Games As Windows starts on-boarding their unified Electron model (I can't recall what they have…
Email doesn't naturally involve the web? What?
Email really is just a protocol for message sending, and it lives on it’s own port with its own server. If you have an email client and access to an email server (POP/SMTP/however), you can use email over the internet but without the “web”.
Basically, the web email client ought not be the only email client.
I prefer well-designed desktop applications to web applications for most things that don't naturally involve the web: * Email clients (I use Thunderbird) * Office suites * Music and media players * Maps * Information managers (e.g., password managers) * Development tools * Personal productivity tools (e.g., to-do lists) * Games As Windows starts on-boarding their unified Electron model (I can't recall what they have…
Email doesn't naturally involve the web? What?
If the web didn't exist, which it didn't prior to 1991, email would still work fine. There just wouldn't be any web-based email clients.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you. As you say, in the long haul, Windows Terminal is considerably better than it would have been thanks to that decision. It feels responsive and lightweight; unlike any Electron app, and that is greatly appreciated by many users, myself included. I look forward to each new version.
Didn't they eventually did some crazy optimizations to keep the terminal in VS Code performant?
also I've never used the VS Code terminal, iterm works better for me. Also because it's its own dedicated app, so I can actually alt-tab to it instead of having to learn whatever shortcut it would be in the editor.
After using Photopea (web) as a virtually full replacement for Photoshop (desktop), I'm starting to think that these days, all interfaces and business logic should be web-first. JavaScript is fast, other languages can compile to it or WebAssembly, and HTML+CSS is a lingua franca. Obviously PWA's are required, designed to run offline. Where brute-force performance is a #1 concern I think it diverges. For things like P…
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 desktop software dead?' https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/10/28/is-desktop-softwar...
Your web app, which requires several extra levels of indirection between the code and the bare metal, an online connection, quite possibly is built on a framework that tends to suck down a significant percentage of my CPU even when it’s idle in the background with all windows closed, and its own weird file management that’s probably a giant hassle when I need to get my work into another program, has no place in my world.