The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#91

Post by uniqueid » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 2:27 AM UTC

bernardv wrote: post #70

uniqueid wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, I understand that. The applications I’m thinking of are those that either have a longer shelf-life and/or are business applications. In Finance, for example, many important vendors have been rolling-out trading front-ends based on web frameworks (maybe Electron for all I know). They are absolutely terrible, again, because of the lack of standard UI usability rules. Combine that with very poor documentation, and…

I emphatically agree with that. My complaint is that it feels like a hopeless battle to try and write good native desktop software today. Every year the OS's APIs and UI change... that means weeks or months tweaking your project every year until you end-of-life your app.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#92

Post by pseudalopex » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 2:32 AM UTC

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…

Basic keyboard shortcuts and undo support aren't random bugs.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#93

Post by mixmastamyk » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 2:33 AM UTC

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…

Odd take, given that with web we end up doing a lot of implementing and styling widgets that are free in desktop toolkits. In three or more languages, scouring docs from every corner of the web at that.

Sure there are libraries of the season to handle most of it, but selecting the best of multiple libs has a cost.

Libraries like Delphi/Lazarus and wxPython, Qt, et al are incredibly productive.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#94

Post by sircastor » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 2:34 AM UTC

kumarvvr wrote: post #81

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.

This is how I think of QML. I don’t think C++ and Qt as accessible as JavaScript, but QML will get you pretty far before you have to wiring the business logic.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#95

Post by ridiculous_fish » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 2:35 AM UTC

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…

These are not "random bugs" but deeply established Mac UI conventions. My point is not "Electron apps are buggy," it's that they are undermining an established set of UI conventions, without advancing a replacement.

There's a virtuous cycle when apps use a platform's native components: apps get the standard UI behaviors for free, users can bring their knowledge from one app to another, and the platform owner can enhance the UI frameworks, improving all the apps on the platform. At least that's the hope.

I can see a future dominated by Electron apps. But Electron is not converging on a new set of UI behaviors that I can bring from one app to another. In any given Electron app, gestures like arrow keys work differently not only from native apps, but from other Electron apps. So I don't use the arrow keys: one less word in my UI vocabulary.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#96

Post by abraxas » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 2:35 AM UTC

johnday wrote: post #63

ridiculous_fish wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A tab in vscode has a dot in it if the contents are modified since last save. If a save is complete, that dot will go away. If there is no dot, the file is unmodified.

Speaking of which, it also changed the decades old symbol for unsaved files (an asterisk) for no discernable reason. Given that it also doesn't save on loss of focus it led to my many WTFs when I first started using it.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#97

Post by pseudalopex » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 2:44 AM UTC

n0w wrote: post #47

overgard wrote: post #5

I 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.

Operating systems provide web views already. Developers like targeting a single version of a single engine.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#98

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 2:48 AM UTC

HeyZuess wrote: post #66

mikewarot wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's a fair comment. But I believe the number of these is probably a small percentage given the size of the stores (at least for Apple). At least in the case of my mother, she has somewhere to go to when there is a problem. I am not discounting the personal computer as a utility, but app stores and restrictions for some are not a hinderance either. With a mac (I am not sure about windows, I gather with ARM it is no…

[deleted]

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#99

Post by mixmastamyk » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 2:53 AM UTC

api wrote: post #62

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…

I'm the author of this, and I don't completely disagree. I don't think the web engine is that bad of a UI layer, but it's nowhere near the best. If you don't like the trend toward web-ification of the desktop, don't blame developers or Electron. Blame OS vendors for refusing to field a portable API for the large common core of desktop app functionality, something for 2D GUIs analogous to OpenGL. Why do we have standa…

> Every other GUI coding paradigm I've seen degenerates into spaghetti code.

That's typically avoided by decoupling model and view and/or similar functional patterns. What else is the paradigm providing?

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#100

Post by mixmastamyk » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 2:58 AM UTC

dccoolgai wrote: post #74

bernardv wrote: post #26

The 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 young devs I speak to stare blankly at me when I enquire about GUI standards and usability best-practices. They are now foreign concepts to a lot of developers. Was there ever really a time when this was de rigeur? I certainly feel it should be, but I've always felt alone having an intense interest in this as a dev.

True but the old toolkits did most of that kind of thing for free. You had to do work to break conventions. With web you and your chosen set of libs have to work to meet them. One model is better. ;-)