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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?

#721

Post by kup0 »

I prefer native apps ALWAYS when possible as a user. I get that it isn't the direction the world is moving, and that's unfortunate.

With all the computer resources in the world (tons of RAM, NVME drives, etc) it's still easy to tell the difference between native and anything else. It's amazing with these resources that apps can just be ridiculously slow-feeling. It's just painfully obvious.

Just another hell we have to accept living in. Overly dramatic? Sure, but I wanted to express how much disgust I feel for non-native apps.

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

#722

Post by [deleted] »

smileysteve wrote: post #494
thrower123 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Targeting Windows alone gets you 90% of the desktop market. 95% if you make it run reasonably in Wine. This argument is often used, but it's an excuse. Anything that you need to run on a desktop can't be used effectively on a touch screen anyway, so phones and tablets don't really count for serious software. (Writing this comment is stretching the bounds of what I can reasonably do on an IPhone).

95% of a market that has shrunk nearly 50% over the last decade. In many ways, the consumer and non specialty business are post desktop. Turns out documents, email, and other communication apps cover 90% of use cases. Anything that requires major performance gets rendered in a cloud and delivered by these other apps.

[deleted]

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

#723

Post by Decade »

acqq wrote: post #709
Decade wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it’s possible for opposite things to be true if they happen to different people. I wasn’t a developer back then. Windows NT required a multiple more RAM to run than the consumer versions of Windows (oh no, bloat!), and was much more picky about what hardware it ran on. Starting with XP, the professional and consumer versions of Windows have merged. We are so lucky.

> I wasn’t a developer back then. That explains your inaccurate perspective. > Windows NT required a multiple more RAM to run than the consumer versions of Windows (oh no, bloat!), and was much more picky about what hardware it ran on. Allow me to claim that that is also not true, in the form you state it. Again, I've lived through all this, and I can tell you what that was about. The "pickiness" of NT was even at th…

> That explains your inaccurate perspective.

Yep, you really succeeded at empathy, there. /s

> reasonable price range

The word “reasonable” is doing a lot of work, here.

Most Pentium II systems were not running Windows NT. They were running Windows 95 or 98, which had arbitrarily severe limitations and lacked memory protections.

So, while it was technically possible to run lots of applications simultaneously on 256 MB of RAM, for most people it was a fun adventure in whether some buggy program has destabilized the system into needing to reboot to run properly again. Or whether it’s still usable with degraded functionality. In my case, that’s without using the cleaning, protection, RAM expander programs.

And even on professional operating systems, web browsers crashed a lot, and any other program that had to deal with untrusted input, which is basically anything that can open files or connect to the network, has gradually bloated as they learn security or add features.

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

#724

Post by [deleted] »

jschwartzi wrote: post #694
arvinsim wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#725

Post by headlamp »

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.

no. just because soldered on ram is bad doesn't mean that bad code is ok.

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

#726

Post by pdimitar »

jotm wrote: post #553
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.

I still use Winamp for offline music. Nothing else is faster.

Try AIMP 3. It's amazing and is an improvement over Winamp.

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

#727

Post by gindely »

fomine3 wrote: post #570
smileysteve wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

95% of a market that has shrunk nearly 50% over the last decade. In many ways, the consumer and non specialty business are post desktop. Turns out documents, email, and other communication apps cover 90% of use cases. Anything that requires major performance gets rendered in a cloud and delivered by these other apps.

really shrunk?

Lots of people use an android or an iPhone as their main computer nowadays. If you're targeting keyboard/mouse style input, then Windows is probably close to as popular as ever. But if you're targeting people using some kind of device to access your service in exchange for money, Windows is wasting your time.

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

#728

Post by squiggleblaz »

thrower123 wrote: post #323
ninjakeyboard wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're working with statically typed compiled languages tho. Once you try using a dynamic language you realize another editor is enough IMO. I use emacs for anything dynamically typed (including compiled languages like elixir) and intellij for scala/java.

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.

Phpstorm compared to vim is like an oceanside resort compared to a walk in the desert without a water bottle. If there's not thousands of bugs I have prevented or discovered thanks to phpstorm, I am not surprised.

Jetbrains products are absolutely critical if you're using a dynamic, uncompiled language and to turn down the offer is professional misconduct even if it requires buying a new computer with more ram. I don't know who thought it's a good idea to pretend that a typo in one use of a variable is a legitimate expression of developer intent, but Jetbrains saves your users from that hell.

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

#729

Post by squiggleblaz »

api wrote: post #689
shp0ngle wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jetbrains stuff is written in java btw, for all languages. (when we talk about “native”/“not native”)

I don't care what it's written in. Native UIs seem to matter more for small to medium size apps. Huge all-encompassing things like Blender, IDEs, etc. seem benefit from a unified, attractive, easy to use UI but it doesn't seem to matter quite as much that it's native. These things are intrinsically huge too so bloat matters less.

I don't think I agree with you; but I will accept that a cross platform toolkit is necessary because you cannot write three tools of the quality of one Jetbrains. But I think you could do the same in Qt with ~manual memory management and it would be significantly more efficient. Qt, I think, is less like Java and rather more akin to an alternative native toolkit (in much the same way that you can choose on X, "oh, I will use Gtk; I will use motif; I will use Qt", you can say the same on Windows "oh, I will use winapi; I will use WPF; I will use UWP; I will use Qt" or MacOS "oh, I will use Cocoa; I will use Qt"). It just happens to be provided by a third party so there's no OS lockin.

I have no problem getting more ram for a Jetbrains product, because they are cheap at the cost of a new laptop. But it would nice to find a 16 GiB laptop would be able to cope with my codebase, my web browser and my vm.

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

#730

Post by MivLives »

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/

I wish so much that 3rd party clients weren't directly against the TOS of Discord. I sorta miss the old days where it seemed like anyone could hook up to MSN/Yahoo/AIM.
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