Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

adamierymenko.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 163 posts

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#51

Post by sebmellen »

overgard wrote: post #49
lubujackson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

OTOH, JavaScript is a poster child for what optimization can do on a language level.

If one were to propose Node.js to a developer 10 years ago, it probably would’ve been seen as a fantasy, but today many production apps run in Node and actually work.

I suspect that with WASM and further development of the Java/Typescript ecosystem, we’ll see highly performant web apps running complex loads in the next 5 years (for better or worse).

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#52

Post by ahartmetz »

sebmellen wrote: post #48
ahartmetz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I may be biased, but I think Qt is pretty great :) It's C++ though. Some people use PyQt. It's popular in some niches, e.g high end VFX packages, especially plugins.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#53

Post by ridiculous_fish »

gobookdev wrote: post #42
ridiculous_fish wrote: post #23

Electron 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.

An example of why it matters: hit command-S to save your file. Native apps confirm the save by highlighting the menu bar until the save is complete.

VSCode does not indicate to the user when the save is complete. I've had saves require 15+ seconds, and they are not atomic, so you must be careful to not use the file (compile, git, etc) until the save is finished, which is hard to know. I've personally lost data this way.

I agree that command palette is great and is clearly a point of convergence among new apps. I wish Apple would embrace it!

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#55

Post by sebmellen »

ahartmetz wrote: post #52
sebmellen wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I may be biased, but I think Qt is pretty great :) It's C++ though. Some people use PyQt. It's popular in some niches, e.g high end VFX packages, especially plugins.

Maybe I've just lived in the webdev world too long and been spoiled by CSS, but making layouts work and fit together is so horribly confounding in Qt and other such frameworks that it makes me want to bash my head against the wall (and I do that enough with CSS).

Also, Qt's licensing model is sub-optimal IMO.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#56

Post by HeyZuess »

mikewarot wrote: post #45

The 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 executabl…

> 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 agree with this in some context, I bought the device, I own it and I should be able to use it as I see fit.

However not all uses are equal. Take my elderly mother, her needs are much different and in fact centralized distribution channels, app reviews, signing etc are all mechanisms which benefit her.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#57

Post by mikewarot »

HeyZuess wrote: post #56
mikewarot wrote: post #45

The 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 executabl…

> 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 agree with this in some context, I bought the device, I own it and I should be able to use it as I see fit. However not all uses are equal. Take my elderly mo…

My limited experience with App stores is that there are usually a large number of "fake" apps that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Has this been addressed on the platforms you're familiar with?

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#58

Post by beckingz »

Zetaphor wrote: post #40

I've been saying a a version of this (the browser will eat the OS) for a few years now, really as soon as I heard about WASM. Once the executives learn that they can deliver binary blobs through the browser, that's the end game for the current distribution model. Piracy will be crippled at the knees and everything will become SaaS. Microsoft has signaled towards this direction when they talked about 10 being the last…

Windows 11 builds are already leaking.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#59

Post by paulryanrogers »

Zetaphor wrote: post #40

I've been saying a a version of this (the browser will eat the OS) for a few years now, really as soon as I heard about WASM. Once the executives learn that they can deliver binary blobs through the browser, that's the end game for the current distribution model. Piracy will be crippled at the knees and everything will become SaaS. Microsoft has signaled towards this direction when they talked about 10 being the last…

> Microsoft has signaled towards this direction when they talked about 10 being the last version of the OS,...

Apparently they never said this, though didn't deny it either. Now with Windows 11 it would seem they are back to selling new OS software.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#60

Post by TheRealPomax »

mikewarot wrote: post #45

The 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 executabl…

Who said anything about giving up? But if you need a UI that's cross-platform compatible with literally zero effort, good luck beating something like React/Vue running in a webview that works both online, offline, and happily on android and ios to boot.
Post reply on HN