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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)

#131

Post by native_samples »

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.

XAML is declarative UI, no?

JavaFX has done what you ask, actually. There's FXML which is an XML UI description language (actually it can describe any object graph) and you can style it with a dialect of CSS2 tuned for desktop apps.

But React/Vue etc aren't quite the same thing are they. React actually throws out normal HTML and replaces it with some sort of HTML-esque simulation that they then try to performantly map to the real thing.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#132

Post by native_samples »

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…

JavaFX + Scene Builder gives you that. FX CSS isn't exactly the same as HTML CSS but it's quite close. When I've used it I've felt that the limits on the styling of my app are mostly my own lack of design skills.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#133

Post by sciprojguy »

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…

It's kind of odd that you mention Apple as a company that has "ditched standards", considering it's got very public, detailed design standards and has had them for a very long time.

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

The web is where you really get that kind of grab-bag of mismatching (or absent) UX affordances. Remember when clickable links were all blue underline text? I do. Those days are gone, and for way too many pages the only way to tell if something is clickable or not is to move the mouse over it and see if it gives you the finger.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#134

Post by p_l »

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…

I have seen most fakes in Apple store, especially targeting apps that weren't available in App Store by itself - so if you were searching, you wouldn't get any good result out.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#135

Post by sciprojguy »

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…

You make it sound like users are switching among Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS all the time so the app UI has to have the lowest common denominator. By and large they're not and as such the native UI is the consistent UI: the apps launch the same way, you know how to get to settings or the trash can and the gestures all do pretty much the same thing to get the same result.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#136

Post by sciprojguy »

mastazi wrote: post #32
jitl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React Native is much more native than Electron, though. There’s no “web” involved in React Native. It just happens that the language (JavaScript) is also used by the web platform.

Yes, this is a fair point. Just worth noting that it's not just JavaScript that makes it web-developer-friendly though, it's also its HTML-like templating system and its CSS-like styling system.

FWIW, the styling system mainly talks to the parameterized native components that the build system pulls down from GitHub. You can do the same kind of thing in SwiftUI using View Modifiers.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#137

Post by maximus-decimus »

pseudalopex wrote: post #105
maximus-decimus wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

They didn't say they don't care about results. The VS Code developers worked to make it what it is. Sublime Text shows it isn't about the technology. Emacs is just from a culture where non Unix and proprietary operating systems are 2nd class.

I would argue using Electron encourages a culture of making your software cross-platform. I am a firm believer in making good things easy and bad things hard.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#138

Post by no_time »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #17

Since the gui-fication of everything, nothing has made making a gui easier than web apps. The reason I like it is because of the cross platform capabilities. I don't have to worry about compiling for different platforms. I don't need to worry about platform specific issues. It's the ultimate form of portable code honestly nowadays.

>The reason I like it is because of the cross platform capabilities.

Anal sex is "cross platform" too. It doesn't make it the superior choice in a large majority of cases.

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#139

Post by blub »

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…

Since you haven't provided any actual arguments, one would have to rely on your reputation to evaluate the claims you made, but since this is a new account with only one post, that's not providing any support either.

For the record, I've also used Delphi, MFC, WinForms, Qt, native Android and iOS, but not TurboVision and very little wxWidgets. I didn't use React, nor Vue, but I am familiar with web development and web technologies in general.

If I look at https://reactjs.org/tutorial/tutorial.html, I find it really really hard to believe that's in any way better than at least Delphi or Qt, to pick just two of the technologies I'm familiar with. There are functions which return HTML code which contain JavaScript code in there. How can one return an from a function with a straight face? :-)

Re: The Web Is Eating the Desktop (2017)

#140

Post by majewsky »

jiggawatts wrote: post #113
cusenses wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Co…

FWIW, it's up in vim. So maybe the VSCode guys all used vim before? :)
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