[deleted]
Going native
151–160 of 245 posts
Re: Going native
#152Postman 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…
>> 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 things to be. The term "native" is used to describe apps developed for a specific operating system. By this definition, clearly Electron apps (and hence Postman) are not native apps. Having to download an installer doesn't make it native. On smartphones, all apps are i…
Why not call it "standalone app" (Chrome-less! though that might be confusing for other reasons.)
Re: Going native
#153Postman 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 used PostMan on the Mac for a couple of projects and now I'm thinking thrice before even starting the app.
The UI makes no sense to me, but I would need an UX study to find out what's up exactly.
I just know
. that I keep searching for buttons
. that somehow Postman never remembers my state. I have these "tabs" open, close them all, close the app, and when coming back there are tabs open again. When I want to close them it asks me about unsaved changes. (Which changes???)
. the panes can be resized in a way that you can hide their content, but have to fiddle around with the mouse to find the invisible point where you can size them up again.
. when saving a large response (1MB) from somewhere it keeps trying to sync that to the library which means that everything else is becoming really slow.
. It's really not easy to rename anything. I click on a Tab, duplicate it, now I have two Tabs with the same name (it does not even say 'duplicate' or 'copy'). I click the title to rename it, nothing happens.
. Oh and the title is displayed twice, once in the tab and once beneath it. Clicking on neither of them gives the option to rename. You have to find the invisible pencil icon first.
. I think the Tab metaphore isn't appropriate, especially the new Tab page. I would like to close everything.
. There should be a feature to auto-name requests or something. I keep being confused between the request, the description, the two titles.
. Don't get me started on managing environments.
Re: Going native
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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 things to be. The term "native" is used to describe apps developed for a specific operating system. By this definition, clearly Electron apps (and hence Postman) are not native apps. Having to download an installer doesn't make it native. On smartphones, all apps are i…
Why not call it "standalone app" (Chrome-less! though that might be confusing for other reasons.)
Mattermost (and Telegram?) call the electron-based apps "desktop apps", which is I feel is a nice tradeoff: not native but not browser.
Re: Going native
#155These '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.
Not sure if you know but in native APIs like Qt you are not limited to the built in components, if you need a custom widget you usually use OOP inheritance and override some methods like paint, maybe hook into some events and you get a custom widget. If you want a fancy button(that you can't get by tweaking existing properties or using styling) you inherit the Button class and add your stuff.
What I hare in Web is that there is not a reusable gridView/listView that is optimized, you always have to create your own or find one specific for the framework/library/thing you use in this project.
Re: Going native
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Point is that if they're selling a product, they could make it more clear what the thing they're selling is. I'm EXACTLY the target market, and they failed to entice me.
You're not the target market if you couldn't figure out what they are. I've never heard of it but one look at the screenshot told me exactly what it is.
That's not a reason to have a poorly explained product or service, it's only a justification for not caring enough about clarity.
But for developers, who see hundreds of libraries and services being posted every day, it matters if there is a clear explanation at the top or not.
Re: Going native
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - 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…
How would you create a native GUI app on Linux for either Gnome or KDE, considering that GTK and Qt are not allowed by this definition?
And yes, you may think: "Easy, if a GTK app runs on Linux its native, if it runs on another platform, it's not". Does that mean JavaScript apps for Gnome[1] can be called native, because they have officially blessed bindings to the underlying framework/platform and are fully integrated with GTK?
If not, does that mean as soon as you use any kind of binding/bridging technology "nativeness" is ruled out? Think of C++ apps for Gnome, they use bindings…
If yes, we are only left with defining what the "official" way for doing GUI's on a given platform is. Whatever the vendor gives us and preinstalls on its OS? Ok, no Electron, it uses the Chrome rendering engine, that is definitely third party and NOT native!
But… What if I open a WebKit WebView from Objective-C[2] to render my HTML from there and write my logic making use of JavaScriptCore[3] on macOS? Are we native yet? :)
[1]: https://developer.gnome.org/gnome-devel-demos/stable/beginne...
[2]: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Co...
Re: Going native
#158With a name like "Postman", one might expect this has something to do with mail, or messaging. The blog post gives no clue as to what it's for. It's apparently a test tool for testing HTTP-based APIs. [1] (HTTP "POST", get it?) Not to be confused with Postman Corporation, which is a "computer repair shop" near CIA headquarters. [1] https://www.getpostman.com/
If you don't know what Postman is you live under a rock and are probably shitty dev. Or you just never touched the web in your life.
Re: Going native
#159This appears to be an electron program. Is that native? I thought it was a specialized browser just for the program. I thought native was more akin to the wikipedia definition:
Re: Going native
#160Read the article, went to home page, clicked in Documentation and still don't know what the application does. Can someone resume in 2 phrases?
You couldn't go to getpostman.com and scroll down a little bit to see a screenshot of it that quickly and clearly gives you an idea of what it does? You're hopeless.