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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)

#111

Post by jiggawatts »

cusenses wrote: post #75
jiggawatts wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS Code has some of the worst product quality I've seen from Microsoft in quite a while. It doesn't hold a candle to IntelliJ or Visual Studio. Even directly comparable "lightweight" editors like ISE are far superior. Random examples of bad behaviour in commonly used parts that would affect just about every user: If you try to search & replace, it'll refuse to remember "replace in selection". It'll reset every time,…

Every tools takes getting used to and learning it's quirks. Where there are problems within VS Code, there will be different problems in IntelliJ. I quite like VS Code while disliking IntelliJ. Same old story of differing preferences. > Someone thought that manually editing JSON files is a suitable GUI for configuring basic settings. There has been a GUI editor for settings for a while now, as well as the JSON editor…

> Every tools takes getting used to and learning it's quirks.

There's necessary differences and quirks, and there's just... unfathomable hubris by the developers, to the level that it's almost an insult to their user base.

Why not alt-drag? EVERY Microsoft tool uses that shortcut EXCEPT for VS Code!

Was it not written by Microsoft developers? Is it conforming to a standard I've never heard of, a standard that nobody else at Microsoft has ever heard of either?

Why didn't they most simply and most trivially just copy the default keyboard shortcuts from Visual Studio? Wouldn't that have been easier for everyone?

Writing something "new" doesn't meant that you're forced at gunpoint to change standards, ignore commonalities, or just do a bad job. It takes the same coding effort to configure "alt-drag" as it takes to configure "middle-drag"! There is no time saved by being sloppy, or lazy. This isn't a corner being cut to save time, this is a reversing of the direction that the steering wheel has to be turned. That doesn't help you manufacture the car faster or cheaper, and it doesn't help drivers.

( I'm not being flippant, the VS Code team literally flips things for no reason. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27807085 )

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#112

Post by jiggawatts »

gobookdev wrote: post #102
cusenses wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every tools takes getting used to and learning it's quirks. Where there are problems within VS Code, there will be different problems in IntelliJ. I quite like VS Code while disliking IntelliJ. Same old story of differing preferences. > Someone thought that manually editing JSON files is a suitable GUI for configuring basic settings. There has been a GUI editor for settings for a while now, as well as the JSON editor…

VS Code has improved so much in such a short period of time, if people are comparing to a 6 months ago there has been endless improvements. I really like Intellij, think it's great as well, but it makes you do things in certain way depending on what language you're using. After learning how VS Code works you can use it however you want with whatever language you want.

I'm on the absolute latest build. All of those issues are from this release.

The previous releases were markedly worse, and absolutely unusable for PowerShell. I've never seen anyone switch from ISE to VS Code willingly. I'm forced, because I'm using some modules that are core-only and required PS 7.0, which works with VS Code only.

It doesn't matter if it has "improved" a lot if it is still by far the worst text editor slash IDE on my computer. I have five others, including two free editors that are better. And faster...

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#113

Post by jiggawatts »

cusenses wrote: post #71
jitl wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no memory for recent searches, so if you've just spent ten minutes carefully crafting a regex and you accidentally click the wrong thing, then it is gone forever. It has this now, although the click target is some teensy text. (I also find the search very frustrating, like it replacing the search with your current selection sometimes)

Up arrow within the textbox also works to restore previous searches.

This function is handled by the DOWN arrow in other text editors!

I just tested a bunch:

   VS Code:       UP
   Visual Studio: DOWN
   Notepad++:     DOWN
   TextPAD:       DOWN
   IntelliJ:      ALT+DOWN
   MS Word:       DOWN
Sigh... I have no words. It's just so sad that I expected this. I literally pressed "DOWN", it didn't work, there's no drop-down GUI indicator, so I just assumed it was a missing feature.

Instead, it's yet another feaure where the VS Code team picked something at random without apparently ever having used any other text editor or IDE in their lives. Ever. Ever before. Of any type, from any platform. Certainly not Microsoft products on Windows.

It boggles the mind. Are they all JavaScript front-end developers with no previous IDE experience other than notepad.exe or something?

Wait... Electron. Ah. They probably are.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#114

Post by pseudalopex »

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…

Operating systems have different features and conventions. And why would vendors care what cross platform technologies you use?

I doubt the framework you want them to create would change much. Many Electron fans talk about how apps should look and feel exactly the same on every OS. They say web technologies are the best UI layer by far. And it isn't like Slack or Microsoft don't have the resources to make native apps.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#115

Post by pseudalopex »

manigandham wrote: post #35
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…

I agree that there's a lot of form-over-function and bad usability decisions in apps but that's completely separate from the underlying frameworks and distribution technology. You can have great webapps and terrible native apps. Also when it comes to usability, users prefer having a consistent UI over a "native" UI, especially as the number of devices have exploded between laptops, phones and tablets. Slack looks and…

Desktop, phone, and tablet apps don't really work the same anyway. Except when they're just scaled up. But everyone agrees that's bad.

I see few people use the same apps on more than 1 desktop and 1 mobile OS. They use Windows and couldn't care less what the macOS app looks like. Or vice versa.

It's about branding usually in my experience. Not what users want.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#116

Post by sk0g »

gobookdev wrote: post #104
sk0g wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

I program mainly in Go, Python, TypeScript and some C/C++. A year ago I would have agreed with you, but one extension for each language now gives you almost everything you need. I bounce back to Goland, Webstorm, CLion and PyCharm occasionally as they have much more reliable refactoring, and have some really nice features missing from VS Code, but being a Polyglot VS Code makes it so much easier to use similar keybin…

You could always install additional language support in your main JB IDE too. I could see some point if you're constantly working in 3+ unrelated languages for sure, but I don't think that's the typical day to day workflow of most people.

The refactoring, intellisense, and bonus features are hard to give up once you get used to them. A good Go debugger, actual Unity integration that inspects the scenes, references, usages, etc, or Python type hinting actually helping the development effort, are just some things that come to mind.

It's cool there's an open source editor that does most things quite well for sure, but a hundred dollars or so is extremely worth it, if you're even 1% more productive. I'd estimate the real boost I got from JB products is much higher, particularly when it came to Go and C#.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#117

Post by AnonHP »

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…

> For myself, whenever I read these kinds of comments (or the tiresome refrain about absurd memory usage) it feels to me like there must be two Electrons: the first being the Electron which is the foundation of nearly every app I actually find useful these days (which do not exhibit e.g. exorbitant memory consumption issues [it's a marginal, non-issue increase in my experience] or higher bug-rates than native apps)

It’s also very tiresome to see such weak defenses when one looks around at the experience of people who have only 8GB RAM and are running Windows 10. If it’s just a war of anecdotes, I have several to share on why Electron is bad (or is badly used) by apps like MS Teams and others. Long ago, people used to complain about Java apps (mainly due to startup time). Electron apps make those seem like nothing to complain about. It’s not just high memory usage or the UX being poor, it’s also about being a poor citizen on the computer and making things worse for all the other applications running at the same time.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#118

Post by westoncb »

ridiculous_fish wrote: post #95
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…

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 enha…

Okay I think I see what you're saying here. The terminology of reducing "UI vocabulary" threw me off some, since you could alternately describe it as an expansion of UI vocabulary: so many things don't have a convention yet that every developer is free to define their own (similar situation in e.g. video game UI where there's constant invention since a fixed widget set isn't getting re-used).

> ... 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

There's certainly an advantage there, but it basically comes down to whether you more highly value cross-platform capabilities or specialization for a specific platform. So why not acknowledge it as the tradeoff it is? Instead the common stance here is to frame it as some kind of cataclysmic regression in software development.

Anecdotally, as someone using mostly Electron-based software, I've yet to run into any kind of issue related to platform integration—but I wouldn't be surprised if people ran into an occasional glitch or inconvenience there. It makes sense given what the software is.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#119

Post by pseudalopex »

orev wrote: post #103
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…

On principle I agree that GUI consistency is something that should be striven for, however when I look at the success of the web and apps, all of which have extremely non-uniform designs, it seems like the users really just don’t care and seem to be able to adapt to anything. That’s not to say they are power users; most users seem to be interested only in the bare minimum needed to do what they want, which doesn’t re…

How often do users have a choice really?

I've seen inconsistency, churn, and simplistic design turn people who used to be power users into helpless feeling novices. We can say something has been lost even if the world isn't literally on fire.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#120

Post by manigandham »

pseudalopex wrote: post #115
manigandham wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there's a lot of form-over-function and bad usability decisions in apps but that's completely separate from the underlying frameworks and distribution technology. You can have great webapps and terrible native apps. Also when it comes to usability, users prefer having a consistent UI over a "native" UI, especially as the number of devices have exploded between laptops, phones and tablets. Slack looks and…

Desktop, phone, and tablet apps don't really work the same anyway. Except when they're just scaled up. But everyone agrees that's bad. I see few people use the same apps on more than 1 desktop and 1 mobile OS. They use Windows and couldn't care less what the macOS app looks like. Or vice versa. It's about branding usually in my experience. Not what users want.

It's not always the same user but a team or entire organization using the same tools, and it helps to unify the experience.

Contrast that with something like Outlook which has a dozen different UIs depending on app or device or website. It causes way more friction than just having the same workflow everywhere.

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