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

121–130 of 163 posts

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#121

Post by uniqueid »

pseudalopex wrote: post #109
uniqueid wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you exaggerate. Some native apps I use were last updated 5 or 10 years ago.

The ability to launch an old Mac binary is different than the Xcode project you used to build it being healthy. A developer can't open a ten year project and just submit it to the app store. Most likely it won't even build.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#123

Post by majkinetor »

jiggawatts wrote: post #64
gobookdev wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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,…

Ah, there is so much wrong with this comment.

Comparing VS Code to ISE is next level of wrong.

You mention mostly few search and replace bugs as a proof, but those are just bugs. There also is search history just behind a hotkeys.

While I agree that search needs some love, its hardly a show stopper.

My experience is exactly the opposite - VSCode has some of the best product quality I've seen from Microsoft ever, period.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#124

Post by westoncb »

AnonHP wrote: post #117
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…

> 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) I…

I only upgraded from my 8GB laptop a couple months ago. And I did run into issues with memory frequently—but here's the thing: I would be running 4 or 5 Electron apps at the same time and they were fine; the memory issues were always from Chrome, so I had to be careful not to keep too many open Youtube, Github, Amazon, etc. tabs open.

A heavier Electron App, e.g. Slack, would be equivalent to maybe two Youtube tabs, out of the ~50 tabs I would have open.

It's not ideal, but it's nowhere near as egregious as comments on HN would leave you to believe.

> 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

I'm not familiar with this argument. How is it a poor citizen aside the dubious claims about excess memory usage? Or is this just a repetition of that argument?

(Incidentally I've also had the misfortune of using MS Teams recently, and I would fully support anyone's complaints about it.)

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#125

Post by pjmlp »

maximus-decimus wrote: post #101
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…

> As a user, I don’t care about the dev’s challenge of supporting multiple OS’s As a user I do care about that. A big selling point of vscode versus emacs for me is that it works "natively" on both Windows and Linux. Finally, I don't need to run a VM just to run emacs. I tried all the other alternatives like Msys2 and cygwin, but they're like their own circle of hell as soon as you need to run executables and all the…

I wonder how I used to run Emacs on Windows NT/2000 without a VM.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#126

Post by pjmlp »

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…

As someone with a similar background that only applies if we are speaking about CRUD forms, anything else Web is a joke versus native tooling for GUI design.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#127

Post by pjmlp »

MattGaiser wrote: post #7

When 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…

There was never a single platform, unless we are talking about 1950's in computing.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#128

Post by sofixa »

pseudalopex wrote: post #114
api wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Many Electron fans talk about how apps should look and feel exactly the same on every OS

Don't you think it's a good idea to have consistent UI and UX cross platform? If a user switches between the mobile/mac/Windows/web version, everything should change?

> And it isn't like Slack or Microsoft don't have the resources to make native apps.

Considering Microsoft seemingly don't have the resources to make a functional Electron app for Teams, and the Linux and macOS versions are always late and buggy, apparently they can't.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#129

Post by native_samples »

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…

Users can adapt to anything because they're flexible and smart. Humans can put up with a lot of problematic things and find their way through anyway, but that's not a great justification for doing so. I think if you want to make a user-centric argument about this, it's that users like web apps because although the UIs end up primitive and inconsistent, the benefits are worth it, benefits like:

- "Instant on" apps without having to manage the computers resources via installation and uninstallation.

- Hassle-free updates that don't bug them all the time due to perverse/skewed value systems amongst developers, who think users deeply care about whether to accept an update or not.

- Not having to worry about malware

- Not having to worry about backups

- Not having to worry about your lethargic and incompetent IT department to roll things out

etc etc. Lots of advantages to web apps, none of which are really intrinsic to the web platform itself and all of which could be implemented also in desktop apps. As in fact, Chrome tries hard to do.

But I don't think the proliferation of web apps is actually due to end-user focused arguments. I think it's mostly about developer convenience and a lot of cultural/ideological assumptions. Web apps are piracy free and naturally justify a subscription model. People have to learn HTML+JS at some point to make websites, so at that point it makes sense to double down on those skills and keep iterating them to learn to make apps as well. You can write cross platform software with Qt or Java but for the longest time (not any more?) people associated the web with openness, being free-as-in-beer, decentralisation, not being controlled by any one company etc. A lot of wholesome stuff. On mobile that's probably still true. On the desktop it's no longer quite so true, if it ever was, but lots of developers really wanted to make a web apps for social reasons as much as technical reasons.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#130

Post by native_samples »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #60
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.

You can do that with JavaFX as well actually. Not many people know about it or do it but you can compile the same codebase to Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. It's not particularly high effort. You can get native binaries without JIT compilation out the other end.
Post reply on HN