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Goodbye, Native Apps

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Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#51

Post by durandal1 »

giantDinosaur wrote: post #38
athenot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's totally possible to build a PWA that behaves like a native app but Apple actively tries to destroy them. It may look the part but it rarely feels like it. Something like OmniGraffle would not end up feeling the same. Even Microsoft's apps on mac feel better than their web-based counterparts in O365.

OmniGraffle could be fine; hasn't Figma shown us the way?

Figma falls into the trap of all other claimed high performing web apps, conflating maintaining a 60fps refresh rate with responsiveness. Try dragging any object around (even simple shapes) and you'll see it trail the mouse cursor in Figma. Does not happen in OmniGraffle. The result is a distinct difference in feel.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#52

Post by emodendroket »

mikewarot wrote: post #3

I have Lazarus up and running... it's currently taking 32 Megabytes of RAM. It compiles in the blink of an eye, has one of the best possible 2 way GUI builders in the open source world, and I can reach back 30 years into the libraries I wrote in the days of Turbo Pascal 7/MS-DOS and pretty much use them intact. It amazes me how many people went with the .NET bloatware and all that follows it. Of course, 95% of progra…

> It amazes me how many people went with the .NET bloatware and all that follows it. Of course, 95% of programmers out there are newer than me and don't have knowledge of this type of efficiency to compare against.

It doesn't amaze me. It's very productive to work in and the bloat just doesn't matter that much in most environments where .NET is even on the table. Now that prevailing trends are different, you can build leaner .NET Core apps.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#53

Post by qayxc »

possiblerobot wrote: post #36
allo37 wrote: post #25

The cheapest laptop I could find on walmart.com right now has 4GB of RAM. "Low-end" isn't what it used to be! Only techies care about things like how much RAM a program is using. End users, from my experience at least, don't really care - as long as it works.

You might be right with respect to non-techie users. But, it's not about whether it merely works. It's about what we could be doing with modern hardware if we used it as efficiently as old software had to use its hardware. What kinds of wild things could we accomplish on this hardware if we weren't bogged down in gigabytes and teraflops of bloat?

> What kinds of wild things could we accomplish on this hardware if we weren't bogged down in gigabytes and teraflops of bloat?

Not that many: An early 1990s PC platform could be thoroughly described in a 200 page book and you could write a boot loader for the CPU, a VGA driver, and drivers for the most common peripherals from scratch in a few weeks.

In fact, games of that era shipped with their own audio drivers, (C/E/V)GA libraries and peripheral support.

Today this would be a) impossible because many manufacturers (cough NVIDIA cough) don't even release OSS drivers and specs and b) individual programs don't own the hardware anymore - the OS does. Also the multitude of target platforms (CPU types, -core counts, and -speeds, graphics cards, peripherals, etc.) makes it virtually impossible to ship code that it optimal for each of even the most common combinations of hardware.

The final nail in the coffin of the "super lean no bloat why-not-just-unikernel-everything-for-maximum-performance" idea can be summed up in one word: cost.

Development costs would be insane if we started optimising every aspect of every program for performance (on every possible platform, no less), memory use, and (binary-) size.

And that's even ignoring the fact that it's more often than not outright impossible to optimise for binary size, runtime performance, and memory footprint all at the same time.

Plus interactions between programs (plugins, {shell-}extensions, data formats, clipboards, etc.) require "bloat" like common interfaces and "neutral" protocols.

Most of the myth of great "old software" comes from the fact that functionality was severely limited compared to modern apps and that many folks simply weren't around to actually see and feel how much some of them actually sucked.

Sure, Visual Studio 6.0 runs incredibly fast on a vintage 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 with 2GiB of RAM using Windows 2000 - but when it released in 1998 many PCs had a 60MHz Pentium 1 or a 100MHz 486DX4 with 64MiB of RAM and it ran like a three-legged dog with worms on these machines compared to the DOS-based Borland-C...

Speaking of which, remember when sometime around the 2000s all Borland Pascal program stopped working, because CPUs had become too fast (>200MHz IIRC)? That was because their runtime used a loop to determine how fast the CPU was, which caused a divide-by-zero on fast machines IIRC.

Good times indeed...

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#54

Post by emodendroket »

As much as anything else the growth of hybrid apps is a symptom of a couple of things:

1) people now expect apps to run on a million different devices and nobody has the time or resources to develop four or five native apps with feature parity between them

2) progress on UI frameworks is pretty much stalled. Just looking at .NET, because I'm familiar with it and traditionally desktop software has been a big area of concern for it, Windows Forms will work for forever but hasn't been touched in a long time, WPF has some sharp edges that make it feel unfinished but isn't being touched, and WinRT was basically stillborn because of their attempts to tie it in with the whole "new" Windows 8 ecosystem. Meanwhile, browsers are getting new capabilities constantly. It's hard to blame anyone who looks at that mess and says to hell with it and goes with a Web browser-based solution.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#55

Post by MattGaiser »

tluyben2 wrote: post #39
allo37 wrote: post #25

The cheapest laptop I could find on walmart.com right now has 4GB of RAM. "Low-end" isn't what it used to be! Only techies care about things like how much RAM a program is using. End users, from my experience at least, don't really care - as long as it works.

As a techie I mostly do not care as long as it works either, if I am not writing it myself (and sometimes even then but I care more now than years ago). However; things do not work a lot of the times; my wife is a writer, almost all my friends are non technical and they complain a lot about how crap everything is. And when I check the culprit is always lack of memory and it is always chrome (the browser and in Electr…

Does the end user care enough to switch? As if all you are doing is complaining but it does not alter behaviour (specifically usage or purchasing behaviour) then for all business purposes they do not care.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#56

Post by emodendroket »

nbrempel wrote: post #11
schwartzworld wrote: post #6

VSCode is a poor example. Its a fully featured IDE, and sure it would be lighter without electron, but it still wouldn't be a lightweight piece of software. I use JetBrains which is not Electron, but also uses it's fair share of ram.

To be fair, JetBrains runs on the JVM which arguably has the same problems.

Yeah but if it didn't, would I be able to run it with no differences on Linux, OS X, and Windows?

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#57

Post by tehabe »

I wonder if there is really a big difference between using an Electron based application or a progressive web application (PWA). My current guess is, that the biggest advantage of PWA's is, that you use the same browser for several applications. But I never really tested my guess.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#58

Post by candiddevmike »

Razengan wrote: post #49
burtonator wrote: post #32

Here's the thing. Apple, Google, etc are trying to lock developers into specific platforms. This is why Apple has been so hostile towards PWAs. It's totally possible to build a PWA that behaves like a native app but Apple actively tries to destroy them. There will never be a viable hybrid app platform.

> It's totally possible to build a PWA that behaves like a native app but Apple actively tries to destroy them. Ugh, no. No it's not. At least not yet. Accessibility features alone are almost always woefully crap in web-apps, compared to what native apps have access to, at least on macOS (and SwiftUI is amazing in how it lowers the barriers in implementing accessibility in your app from the get-go.) Shit like Electro…

You really think accessibility for native apps will always be better than a web app that follows a11y?

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#59

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

qayxc wrote: post #53
possiblerobot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be right with respect to non-techie users. But, it's not about whether it merely works. It's about what we could be doing with modern hardware if we used it as efficiently as old software had to use its hardware. What kinds of wild things could we accomplish on this hardware if we weren't bogged down in gigabytes and teraflops of bloat?

> What kinds of wild things could we accomplish on this hardware if we weren't bogged down in gigabytes and teraflops of bloat? Not that many: An early 1990s PC platform could be thoroughly described in a 200 page book and you could write a boot loader for the CPU, a VGA driver, and drivers for the most common peripherals from scratch in a few weeks. In fact, games of that era shipped with their own audio drivers, (C…

I have a one word counter response. Winamp.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#60

Post by qayxc »

tluyben2 wrote: post #39
allo37 wrote: post #25

The cheapest laptop I could find on walmart.com right now has 4GB of RAM. "Low-end" isn't what it used to be! Only techies care about things like how much RAM a program is using. End users, from my experience at least, don't really care - as long as it works.

As a techie I mostly do not care as long as it works either, if I am not writing it myself (and sometimes even then but I care more now than years ago). However; things do not work a lot of the times; my wife is a writer, almost all my friends are non technical and they complain a lot about how crap everything is. And when I check the culprit is always lack of memory and it is always chrome (the browser and in Electr…

> And when I check the culprit is always lack of memory and it is always chrome (the browser and in Electron) that is eating all of it.

Are you sure it's not the "150 IQ I-have-20-tabs-open-at-any-given-time" usage pattern that's actually causing this? I just checked out of curiosity and Edge (for lack of an installed Chrome) used "just" ~380MiB for a rather big website.

Sure, websites (and especially ads!) taking up unnecessary amounts of memory and performance play into this, too, but the expectation that you can just leave 10 bloated websites open on a glorified netbook from 2014 is more to blame than anything else.

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