Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps? • Hacker News Board

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

#771

Post by tumult » Fri, May 22, 2020, 1:18 AM UTC

MivLives wrote: post #765

tumult wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where in the terms of service does it say that third party clients are disallowed? (It doesn’t.)

While it does not explicitly state that, it does say: "(ii) copy, adapt, modify, prepare derivative works based upon, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, attempt to discover any source code, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise exploit the Service or any portion of the Service, except as expressly permitted in these Terms;" [1] Given…

Ripcord isn't a modification of their software. It's an original implementation. I didn't look at any of their code.

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

#772

Post by ikura » Fri, May 22, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

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…

With Skype you're definitely able to receive separate streams from each participant, as I can access them individually via NDI and pipe them into OBS to do live multi-party interviews. You can see the resolution of individual feeds change when their bandwidth drops, and you can choose high/low bandwidth and latency modes for each feed. I would guess Zoom does the same but doesn't provide an NDI feed (yet).

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

#773

Post by bfuller123 » Sat, May 23, 2020, 3:16 AM UTC

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…

What are some solid resources for learning more about optimization? I graduated from a bootcamp, and at both jobs I have had I ask my leads about optimization and making it run even faster and am often told that we don't need to worry about it because of how fast computers are now. But I am sitting there thinking about how I want my stuff to run like lightning for every system.

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

#774

Post by hawaiianbrah » Sun, May 24, 2020, 5:07 AM UTC

suyash wrote: post #509

hawaiianbrah wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn’t that Java’s original selling point, it runs anywhere (there’s a JVM)?

Yes, today you can use JavaFx to build cross platform desktop apps.

Sounds like that’s the Java Swing replacement for the same thing you could do over a decade ago?

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

#775

Post by ClikeX » Thu, May 28, 2020, 7:49 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #658

ClikeX wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a younger developer I'd say I agree. But it's not just developers being used to resources being plentiful. I do webdev mostly and there it's also a matter of management. I want to optimize applications to be less hungry, those are interesting challenges to me. But I've been told by management to just upgrade the server. Either I'd spend a day optimizing, and maybe fixing the issue. Or we just spend 50 euros a mont…

> Either I'd spend a day optimizing, and maybe fixing the issue. Or we just spend 50 euros a month more on a server. So, discounting additional effects like more satisfied userbase, the optimization would pay for itself in a year. And optimizations stack.

Yes, that was my thought process as well. But management didn't agree. To them, the short term cost of me optimizing the problem was higher than the long term costs would be.

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

#776

Post by ninjakeyboard » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

Groxx wrote: post #695

api wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disillusione…

But the tooling on emacs or whatever is up to par. That was my original point, not that a plain text editor is a real man's way, just that it's good enough. PyCharm or whatnot isn't necessarily much better than what you can do in emacs, but it isn't portable to other languages or as flexible. A text editor like vi or emacs isn't much different than an IDE's functionality when looking at a dynamic language. It's a WHOLE DIFFERENT WORLD with scala though (IMO - that's arguable but refactorings etc aren't on parity with intellij), and I don't foresee myself ditching intellij for scala dev any time soon.

I remember showing a scala developer who was using sublime the "extract method" feature and some refactorings in intellij and he was like "HOW DOES IT KNOW ABOUT THE CODE THOUGH???" - the IDEs have great features, but they're less differentiating for dynamic languages as a lot of the OSS tools are just as good. Eg VS Code MS Python extension for example. It's just great.

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

#777

Post by Strom » Mon, Jun 01, 2020, 6:39 PM UTC

smileysteve wrote: post #713

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.

Note: People questioning the stats https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-... Note that this data is missing phones. 2010: 157mm Desktops, 201mm Laptops sold 2019 forecast; 88.4 + 166mm Or, perhaps better, is in terms of internet use https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/mobile-desktop-internet... Mobile went from 16.2% to 53% of traffic since 2013; nearly 4 fold. Which means since 2013, non mobil…

Shippments of desktops/laptops doesn't tell the whole story. I'm still using a 2009 desktop (with some upgraded components) and wouldn't show up on any of those stats. Similar story for a lot of my friends. They still use desktops/laptops daily, but they don't replace them as often as in the 2000s.