> In ten years nearly every desktop app that isn't over ten years old will be a progressive web app or a containerized (e.g. Electron) web app.
What proportion of desktop apps are computer games?
The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)
41–50 of 163 posts
Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)
#42Electron is a large step backwards in usability and software quality. Spotify has its own context menus which don't support arrow keys or type select. GitHub Desktop has a "Select All" which doesn't actually Select All, only what's been paged in. VSCode doesn't confirm key equivalents by highlighting the menu bar. All of them blink the cursor even without typing focus. All of them steal focus at launch. Our UI vocabu…
VS Code is my favourite software of all time, no need to use the menu bar with the command pallete and the excellent custom keybinds. It completely gets out of the way it is still more feature rich than any IDE through extensions. A blinking cursor is a small price to pay, I haven't even noticed that. I know it's not meant to be good being written in mostly TypeScript, but it just is.
Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)
#43I love JavaScript
Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)
#44The webification of Desktop app GUI’s is the result of a total disregard for usability .. from a user’s point-of-view (not a developer’s point-of-view of what users >should As a user, I don’t care about the dev’s challenge of supporting multiple OS’s. These best experience comes when I load up a new application and can intuitively navigate it without the mental overload required trying to decipher a GUI layout which…
Most of that is true (well, except for web frameworks bring great; I don't think anything about web development achieves greatness) but, where Apple is concerned, much of the problem is the short release cycle they moved to about a decade ago.
It's not remotely worth it to me carefully to build a desktop app for a platform that I can't count on staying the same for more than a year.
Actually, it's not even a question of whether it's worth it; in some cases, it's physically impossible for a solo-developer to develop a large app on the shifting sand that is MacOS.
Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)
#45The main advantage of writing a program instead of an app is that you can utilize all of the power of the underlying operating system to give the user an experience that is fast, user friendly, and efficient.
If everyone is willing to throw that away, say goodbye to general purpose computing, and say welcome to your new App Store Overlords.
The last GUI program I wrote in Lazarus worked out to a 24 megabyte executable, because I left the debug information in. It used MySQL and did a lot of computing with gear information. I didn't have to sign the code, or ask ANYONE's permission to deploy it.
I'm not giving up general purpose computing, neither should you.
Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)
#46Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)
#47I think this is probably true, but I kind of hate it. It's such a staggering waste of computing resources. I don't know, maybe we can get to the point where these apps that include an entire browser are highly optimized but it's still kinda nuts.
This will change as OS's embrace the idea more. Apps won't need to package a runtime when it's provided by the OS.
Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)
#48When there was a single platform (Windows), native made sense as either way it was one codebase. You now need to support at least two desktop platforms and some computers now only support web stuff (Chromebooks). The only argument for native is if resources are such that make a web app impractical for most people (high performance GPU intensive stiff). Otherwise, sure, Electron isn't that efficient and takes up relat…
With a cross-platform native toolkit, there is also one codebase.
But what cross-platform native toolkits really work and are easy to get started with? I would love to see some sort of CSS -> native GUI UI kit, or maybe something like what Sublime Text has if it were open-sourced.
Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)
#49I think this is probably true, but I kind of hate it. It's such a staggering waste of computing resources. I don't know, maybe we can get to the point where these apps that include an entire browser are highly optimized but it's still kinda nuts.
Recognize this is a stepping stone toward a better experience. Electron apps are slow, but eventually MS or Apple will decide to launch some sort of "integrated web desktop API" that plays well with Electron (and eventually eats its lunch). Seeing the speed boost, the other desktop OSes will do the same and suddenly we are all coding for the web for everything while the guts are rearranged dramatically beneath us. Th…
Arguably this exists right now, at least I know Microsoft kind of has it, but a lot of the web is always going to inherently be more expensive (much higher RAM usage, 3 stage JITs, etc)
Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)
#50How does security factor into this? Seems like we keep exposing more and more data to networks while at the same time collecting more and more data on everyone. It doesn't seem like a great combination for those who have to protect this data nor for those who will be the most harmed if it gets out (the folks the data is about, not the companies that leaked it).
Electron apps aren't tied to the internet any more than any other app is.
In theory, though many Electron apps end up serving as an isolated browser window to serve a web view or PWA, behavior which is discouraged/harder in true native app development.