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The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

adamierymenko.com

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Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#81

Post by kumarvvr »

hrififjkrjr wrote: post #16

The usual retort is "people use Electron because they only know web technologies". No, it's not only that. I've been programming GUI apps for 30 years, going through TurboVision, Delphi, MFC, WinForms, wxWidgets, Qt, WPF, native Android/iPhone, and probably 2 more I forgot about. They all suck terribly when compared to React/Vue/HTML/CSS. Creating a GUI app with web tech it's just so much more productive. It's like c…

Yeah, This I agree. Even WPF is too complicated, in spite of including XML based UI and binding paradigms.

I am really surprised there are no projects that extract the essence of the HTML/JS/CSS UI system (declarative UI with on the fly control) and use that to render to any surface.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#82

Post by ferdowsi »

kumarvvr wrote: post #80

I always thought that deploying web apps as desktop apps is a great thing to do. As in, not bunch it up into electron, but using shell scripting to start a local only web server and send a command to the OS to open a localhost page. The advantages are that you don't need bloated software to do stuff, you have the full power of the OS, because you have a local webserver running, you have access to the file system, etc…

Most consumers don't want anything to do with shell scripting or npm install.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#83

Post by sk0g »

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.

> VS Code ... is still more feature rich than any IDE through extensions.

Not sure what you program in, but that has not been my experience at all. C# (Unity), Golang, Python have pretty mediocre support at best in VS Code. What JetBrains' products do there is miles ahead, and tacking on countless extensions doesn't get you close to the out of the box experience, so I fail to see the point.

If I'm quickly editing a single file, sure I might fire up VS Code or Micro. For actual work though, the JetBrains products can't be beat (for me at least).

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#84

Post by kumarvvr »

ferdowsi wrote: post #82
kumarvvr wrote: post #80

I always thought that deploying web apps as desktop apps is a great thing to do. As in, not bunch it up into electron, but using shell scripting to start a local only web server and send a command to the OS to open a localhost page. The advantages are that you don't need bloated software to do stuff, you have the full power of the OS, because you have a local webserver running, you have access to the file system, etc…

Most consumers don't want anything to do with shell scripting or npm install.

They don't have to do that. You can have a tiny OS specific program that takes care of the starting part and hide the terminal window and other stuff from the user and simply open a web page.

Or, even a full web browser view embedded inside a custom window. (If users expect a non-browser UI)

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#85

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

the_only_law wrote: post #28
hrififjkrjr wrote: post #16

The usual retort is "people use Electron because they only know web technologies". No, it's not only that. I've been programming GUI apps for 30 years, going through TurboVision, Delphi, MFC, WinForms, wxWidgets, Qt, WPF, native Android/iPhone, and probably 2 more I forgot about. They all suck terribly when compared to React/Vue/HTML/CSS. Creating a GUI app with web tech it's just so much more productive. It's like c…

I wanted to do a mockup of a UI a few moth back. It was moderately complex, I suppose. And I was just trying to find something that would let me build out a shell. I started on Linux and I found most of the UI frameworks to be quite disappointed and a bit involved for what I was wanting to do. I think I was splaying with Glade and then QT creator and realizing just how much boilerplate code I'd have to write to get t…

I unabashedly love WPF but I 100% agree on the need for a CSS-like interface for styling. It's a blind spot that was forgivable ten+ years ago but nowadays there's really no excuse for it.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#86

Post by jdauriemma »

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…

PWAs and Electron apps don’t depend on walled gardens and app stores - they’re every bit as open by default.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#87

Post by seabird »

I think this take is right in the sense that most consumer-oriented shitware and business CRUD programs are going to be written as web apps from here on out, but I don't really buy that it will completely supplant native software. If you're reading this site, you're probably in tune with the latest hype cycles, and see the world in that lens.

In the same vein as the Dark Matter Developer post that occasionally pops up on here, most of the world's software is Dark Matter Software. Mountains of native software quietly runs the world, completely oblivious to the churn we're discussing. Replacing their functionality with a webapp is either impossible or just not worth it.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#88

Post by zach_garwood »

rogerkirkness wrote: post #68
imbnwa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the development workflow/environment?

VSCode running on the Linux container thing.

> the Linux container thing

I think "Linux Container Thing" is actually a better name than "Windows Subsystem for Linux."

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#89

Post by Nicksil »

westoncb wrote: post #79
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…

Electron seems to have reached the status of being a political topic. For many people it's something to rally around or (more frequently here) against. You're either for it or against it. The above arguments would not be taken seriously on another topic, but here their weakness can be overlooked (by some) since folks are already committed to the the stance they support. Look at the argument more closely: they're nami…

Of course any point is meaningless when you define it as such for yourself. Your differing perspective and casual dismissal doesn't make their points any less relevant.

The points they brought up are not meaningless and more people than what it seems you imagine are affected by the shortcomings outlined by the points made prior.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#90

Post by westoncb »

Nicksil wrote: post #89
westoncb wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron seems to have reached the status of being a political topic. For many people it's something to rally around or (more frequently here) against. You're either for it or against it. The above arguments would not be taken seriously on another topic, but here their weakness can be overlooked (by some) since folks are already committed to the the stance they support. Look at the argument more closely: they're nami…

Of course any point is meaningless when you define it as such for yourself. Your differing perspective and casual dismissal doesn't make their points any less relevant. The points they brought up are not meaningless and more people than what it seems you imagine are affected by the shortcomings outlined by the points made prior.

But... I didn't dismiss them, I specifically addressed the flawed structure of their argument.

They made some more assertions in the second paragraph but didn't offer any support for them so I haven't addressed them separately.

With something like: "Undo support used to be table stakes, but now I'm surprised when it works" —I have to go back to the "two Electrons" I mentioned previously: not sure what world this is where software and business interests have so radically altered as to no longer support e.g. undo. It sounds like they ran into a bug related to undo somewhere and now are weaponizing the fact (as in their first paragraph) as a general argument against the framework.

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