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Going native

blog.getpostman.com

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Re: Going native

#71

Post by throwaway2048 »

kangoo1707 wrote: post #61
hizanberg wrote: post #53

When did we start calling Electron Apps, Native Apps? Is it now a marketing ploy to call your App native when it's not? If your App renders in a WebView then by definition it's not native and shouldn't be labelled as such so it doesn't devalue Apps that use Native OS's UI components and idioms that are truly Native. If it has a mix of native and WebView controls then it's at best a Hybrid App.

If an app can be installed the same way a "native" app does, it is a native app. Users do not care about the technology behind the scene and what they are called.

They care when an app is a laggy mess that eats battery, cpu and memory like crazy

Re: Going native

#72

Post by Veratyr »

a85 wrote: post #62
hizanberg wrote: post #53

When did we start calling Electron Apps, Native Apps? Is it now a marketing ploy to call your App native when it's not? If your App renders in a WebView then by definition it's not native and shouldn't be labelled as such so it doesn't devalue Apps that use Native OS's UI components and idioms that are truly Native. If it has a mix of native and WebView controls then it's at best a Hybrid App.

I am not sure why something would be inherently superior if it is using pre-built OS components. Any software can have memory leaks, buggy behavior, weird input issues etc. I'd rather look at the user experience and qualify something as better/worse after using it. Postman had issues in the beginning when we started porting things over but these were quickly solved and in fact gave us much more power over the experie…

The point isn't entirely that "true" native apps are superior, the point is really that WebView wrappers are no more a "native" application than a standard HTML web application, because that's exactly what they are and pretending otherwise is deceptive.

As for applications built with OS components being inherently better, there are a few reasons for me:

- They are guaranteed to fit in with OS styling

- They near-universally perform better (and I don't see how this can change, given the way browsers are forced to render things)

- The underlying functionality is written in native code, which allows for optimizations that cannot be made on web applications

- They don't have the insane and unnecessary bloat of a modern web browser attached.

Re: Going native

#73

Post by Deusdies »

kangoo1707 wrote: post #61
hizanberg wrote: post #53

When did we start calling Electron Apps, Native Apps? Is it now a marketing ploy to call your App native when it's not? If your App renders in a WebView then by definition it's not native and shouldn't be labelled as such so it doesn't devalue Apps that use Native OS's UI components and idioms that are truly Native. If it has a mix of native and WebView controls then it's at best a Hybrid App.

If an app can be installed the same way a "native" app does, it is a native app. Users do not care about the technology behind the scene and what they are called.

So in your opinion, are Cordova apps also native apps?

Re: Going native

#74

Post by fnordsensei »

kangoo1707 wrote: post #61
hizanberg wrote: post #53

When did we start calling Electron Apps, Native Apps? Is it now a marketing ploy to call your App native when it's not? If your App renders in a WebView then by definition it's not native and shouldn't be labelled as such so it doesn't devalue Apps that use Native OS's UI components and idioms that are truly Native. If it has a mix of native and WebView controls then it's at best a Hybrid App.

If an app can be installed the same way a "native" app does, it is a native app. Users do not care about the technology behind the scene and what they are called.

Aren't we conflating "desktop app" with "native app" in that case? Why do users have to be exposed to the word "native" at all? Just say "desktop app".

Re: Going native

#76

Post by johnflan »

a85 wrote: post #29
johnflan wrote: post #12

These 'native' wrapped apps on desktop and mobile are always less in some way than a real native app. I know there is a cost benefit argument, but I personally avoid them.

I'd argue that the HTML/CSS/JS layer is more powerful and more extensible than any native rendering layer. We are building some awesome UI components using this: http://blog.getpostman.com/2017/02/28/introducing-the-new-da... Things that we build for the app are also available for our web components instantly. React makes this even easier.

That might be true, all UI development over the last few years has gone into the JS environment. But the responsiveness of native always wins out for me.

Nice UI is not good UX

Re: Going native

#77

Post by theonemind »

charlieegan3 wrote: post #66
EduardoBautista wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Luckily, there is Paw[0] if you want a native experience on the mac. [0]: https://paw.cloud

I really can't recommend this any more either - it used to be really nice but it seems to crash most times I come to use it now. There seem to be updates coming out regularly but they don't seem to fix the issues I'm having.

I've found the developer pretty responsive to bug reports, which is nice.

Re: Going native

#78

Post by johnflan »

CountSessine wrote: post #22
johnflan wrote: post #12

These 'native' wrapped apps on desktop and mobile are always less in some way than a real native app. I know there is a cost benefit argument, but I personally avoid them.

I don't think that that's always true. I think the gold-standard for this is Slack (at least on OSX). Spotify is nice too. Both seem to combine the very best of web dev (nice presentation and service integration) while cancelling out its worst problems (like accidental browser navigation).

I would have to disagree, it may be the best of breed but thats not saying much.

Re: Going native

#79

Post by tragic »

smlacy wrote: post #64
blizkreeg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fairly well known tool if you're a consumer/producer of APIs for web/mobile dev. May be that's why?

No its not. :) Blog has no product description, and even the product description on getpostman.com (below the fold) is amazingly vague: "A powerful GUI platform to make your API development faster & easier, from building API requests through testing, documentation and sharing." So... It's a text editor? A test framework? What languages does it work with? Web APIs or native? Why would I use it over my existing toolcha…

In the time it took you to write this post, you could have googled it like thirty times. What's your point?

It's just a gui version of curl with helpful things like an editor for post bodies, persistence of old requests, stuff like that.

Re: Going native

#80

Post by scaryspooky »

badminton1 wrote: post #70
hizanberg wrote: post #53

When did we start calling Electron Apps, Native Apps? Is it now a marketing ploy to call your App native when it's not? If your App renders in a WebView then by definition it's not native and shouldn't be labelled as such so it doesn't devalue Apps that use Native OS's UI components and idioms that are truly Native. If it has a mix of native and WebView controls then it's at best a Hybrid App.

Well, many widget libraries use markup languages, Qt has QML, WPF has XAML, and could give more examples but you get the idea. Personally I prefer using Burp rather than Postman.

QT has direct bindings to the host platforms C code. How you express layout of a view is very, very different than how you directly use OS APIs.
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