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Going native

blog.getpostman.com

131–140 of 245 posts

Re: Going native

#131
I have had developed chrome apps and extensions in the past, and this is totally relatable.

Chrome sucks in terms of providing support to developers and building robust features.

(Coming down to Indiranagar for a treat from your end. :P)

Re: Going native

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pedantic force is strong here.

Not really. Especially not on Hacker News. There's an expectation when someone says native app that you're getting a binary that you compiled from source you created with a reasonable expectation of performance. No one thinks native as being a webview wrapped executable where the authored source is actually a series of HTML, CSS, and javascript. They just don't. Calling it "native" is a misnomer.

You're right about the meaning of 'native', but if you expect to have a 'reasonable expectation of performance' just because an app is written as a native binary, you may be sorely disappointed. There are plenty of poorly performing native applications out there, and it's also certainly possible to write minimal, fast HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

Re: Going native

#133
I don't want to "sign in to a Postman account" to download it. Sorry, I'll use something else.

UPDATE: I stand corrected. One can download without signing up. Sorry, I guess I'll try this after all :)

Re: Going native

#134

I don't want to "sign in to a Postman account" to download it. Sorry, I'll use something else. UPDATE: I stand corrected. One can download without signing up. Sorry, I guess I'll try this after all :)

There's a secret option to skip it.

You don't have to sign in to use it

Re: Going native

#135
post #88

Postman founder here HN folks. Great to see the post get featured on the homepage! Lots of discussion about what is exactly native. I have posted some replies but some other points about the choice of words: 1. Postman has 3 million users and about 1.5 million MAUs. When we tell people we have a native app, they get it. People go to our apps page, download the installer and see everything exactly as they expect thing…

I think calling it "standalone app", rather than native would have been more correct. Yeah, go ahead and do exactly that.

Re: Going native

#136
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-univ…

> - They are guaranteed to fit in with OS styling They aren't. For example, if you move your cursor to a word in macOS, and force touch, pop up will appear with word's definition from Dictionary.app. This is not a case in "native" applications that render text differently, Sublime Text is my offender, but there must be others. So "guarantee" is too strong of a word.

But sublime isn't really a native app either. When did we start corrupting the meaning of native? When electron apps appeared, and we wanted to divide "compiled" versus "interpreted webapps" on the desktop?

Cross platform toolkits, be it proprietary, one-off like Sublime's, or things like Qt, GTK, WxWidgets, Java Swing, were NEVER considered native. Just because an app is written in C or C++ doesn't make it platform native.

Textmate is a native editor for MacOS. Sublime is not.

Re: Going native

#137
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Especially not on Hacker News. There's an expectation when someone says native app that you're getting a binary that you compiled from source you created with a reasonable expectation of performance. No one thinks native as being a webview wrapped executable where the authored source is actually a series of HTML, CSS, and javascript. They just don't. Calling it "native" is a misnomer.

You're right about the meaning of 'native', but if you expect to have a 'reasonable expectation of performance' just because an app is written as a native binary, you may be sorely disappointed. There are plenty of poorly performing native applications out there, and it's also certainly possible to write minimal, fast HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

Absolutely. But you don't start out with a large memory footprint like an electron app, you actually have to code yourself into that problem instead of immediately inheriting it.

I'd still argue that most people are going to assume that a native app is probably faster than your average electron app, for a whole host of reasons.

Re: Going native

#138
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Especially not on Hacker News. There's an expectation when someone says native app that you're getting a binary that you compiled from source you created with a reasonable expectation of performance. No one thinks native as being a webview wrapped executable where the authored source is actually a series of HTML, CSS, and javascript. They just don't. Calling it "native" is a misnomer.

You're right about the meaning of 'native', but if you expect to have a 'reasonable expectation of performance' just because an app is written as a native binary, you may be sorely disappointed. There are plenty of poorly performing native applications out there, and it's also certainly possible to write minimal, fast HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

That's comparing outlier to outlier. If you compare two averagely coded apps, something written in C++ will make an absolute joke of something written in Javascript.

Re: Going native

#139

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.

Electron apps are more native than Chrome apps. Electron apps integrate much better with macOS than do Chrome apps: - With a Chrome app, I found that pressing Cmd-Q quits Chrome, not just the Chrome app. - Electron apps have more useful menus than Chrome apps. - Electron apps like Simplenote usually work offline, while some of the Chrome apps I've used don't. ... and so on. I agree with you that it's still not 100% a…

[deleted]

Re: Going native

#140

Hmm, does Electron really == "native" ??

It's a native binary executable with standard access to system APIs, so in the technical sense, yes.

The technical sense meaning it's not interpreting some random scripting language and rendering with HTML/dom?

Because that's the meaningful sense.

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