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Closing a 30 pixel gap between native and web

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Closing a 30 pixel gap between native and web

#161

Post by bigyikes »

5d8767c68926 wrote: post #133
bigyikes wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word “cheaper” here is doing a lot of work. Yes, it’s cheaper, meaning that it allows you to ship more stuff faster. You could make the argument that this results in lower quality, but this isn’t always the case. (For example, VS Code feels great!) Still, I’d often rather have twice the features at 80% the quality, instead of an extremely high quality product that doesn’t have the features I need. Cheapness leads…

We're taking about a trillion dollar company who can afford all of the talent and has very limited time pressure. I would prefer they do it correctly.

This misses the point. A trillion dollars goes a lot further when the software is cheaper.

Re: Closing a 30 pixel gap between native and web

#162

Post by zeta0134 »

I am reminded very strongly of the line of death:

https://textslashplain.com/2017/01/14/the-line-of-death/

Now, don't get me wrong, I love the idea of progressive web apps, but the web is also easily the very least secure thing I do with my computer on a regular basis. The last thing I want is yet another way for a web page to pretend to look like a native app. Even with my decades of experience, I am liable to be fooled in a hasty, tired moment, and I suspect I'm not alone.

Re: Closing a 30 pixel gap between native and web

#163

Post by _gabe_ »

LASR wrote: post #127
_gabe_ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this all the time, and I honestly do not get it. As someone that has ported a game written in C++ for Windows to Linux... its not that hard. It took me 2 days, about 4 hours of work total, and most of the ports I had to make were because I'm an obstinate developer and didn't use the std lib functions that would handle the OS wrapping for me. Now, I've never ported an app to mobile, and that may be entirely diff…

> ported a game Most of the immediate pain with native to native ports is shift between UI frameworks. This always requires a huge investment to do correctly. Not sure about your specific game, but if you're using an engine or handling widget rendering yourself, you won't feel this pain. Simply changing your compiler target is easy. This is not what people are complaining about obviously.

> Not sure about your specific game, but if you're using an engine or handling widget rendering yourself, you won't feel this pain.

Out of all the apps that I listed, I don't believe any of them use native desktop widgets/controls/ui frameworks, except the Microsoft products. And even then, the Microsoft products are definitely using customized widgets which means they're writing a lot of custom rendering code anyways.

Edit: I'd also like to add that the original comment said that electron is portable, implying that portability is a tremendous feat. This is what I'm arguing against. Sure if you wrote your entire app in WPF, that's going to be next to impossible to port. But if you want to make a cross platform app, then it's not difficult to use a framework like QT to have a native cross platform app as opposed to embedding an entire browser runtime to get a portable app. This false dichotomy is what I don't get. It's not 2000 anymore, there's no reason portability has to be treated as some boogeyman that can only be solved by shipping extremely bloated software for a native cross platform app.

Also, here's a big list of C++ GUI libraries if QT doesn't float your boat https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/babfl5/a_pretty_big_li...

Re: Closing a 30 pixel gap between native and web

#164

Post by chazeon »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #118

Separately from the issue of titlebars, I want Chrome's PWAs to open external links in my default browser (Firefox), not a new Chrome window. Sadly I can't make Firefox install web apps as system icons because they removed experimental Firefox SSB support (they said to reduce maintenance overhead). Interestingly I found https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-fire... but have not tried it yet.

Yeah I hope Firefox could support desktop PWAs. I am moving towards Firefox from Edge due to the Manifest v3, but I cannot leave Edge due to its better PWA support, which my daily driver code-server relies on.

Re: Closing a 30 pixel gap between native and web

#165

Post by xcrunner529 »

binkHN wrote: post #116
dmayle wrote: post #12

I think this is a sign that Microsoft sees the writing on the wall. There will be a day when Windows is left behind, and they want to make sure that they can continue to deliver the Microsoft experience, even on other platforms.

I have to agree with this. Many Win32 things are disappearing, Azure is running on Linux and Microsoft is porting their major Win32 cash cow services to run on Linux as well.

Azure runs on Windows and Hyper-V

Re: Closing a 30 pixel gap between native and web

#166

Post by ryukoposting »

tablespoon wrote: post #105
n8cpdx wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Traditional Windows apps all use system provided common controls, because they are good, and therefore they have a consistent look and feel, even through OS updates. This hasn’t been consistent since at least Vista and the release of WPF, which does totally custom control rendering. Circa 2006. I think web is taking over on Windows because any of 10 or 15 different design systems can get you to a better app than th…

> I think web is taking over on Windows because any of 10 or 15 different design systems can get you to a better app than the native (whatever that means) toolkits in much less time. It is easier to get a decent color picker in a web app than a WPF, WinForms, UWP, WinUI, or Win32 app (assuming you have a reasonably high expectation for UI/UX, as I do). I'll grant you that it's probably easier and cheaper to get a wor…

I think I agree with you, but I need a clear definition of "cheaper."

To me, "cheaper" means that companies are putting fewer resources into Windows-specific app development. That's not unexpected, given large portions of their user base are using MacOS, Android, or iOS. Why would I hire 8 developers to make 4 apps, when I could hire 6 developers to make make 3 or even 2 apps? Oh, as an added bonus, now my app can also be loaded straight from a browser, no installation necessary? And I don't have nagging complaints from small-market-share users (Linux and BSD) complaining that my app doesn't work on their machines? Seems like a no-brainer.

From a business perspective, if the end product is good enough that the customers don't complain, what reason is there to not* use web technologies?

Don't get me wrong, I hate that half the software I use today is just a glorified Chrome tab. I hate how I need 16GB of RAM to do my job.

Re: Closing a 30 pixel gap between native and web

#167

Post by kajaktum »

bigyikes wrote: post #113
tablespoon wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think web is taking over on Windows because any of 10 or 15 different design systems can get you to a better app than the native (whatever that means) toolkits in much less time. It is easier to get a decent color picker in a web app than a WPF, WinForms, UWP, WinUI, or Win32 app (assuming you have a reasonably high expectation for UI/UX, as I do). I'll grant you that it's probably easier and cheaper to get a wor…

The word “cheaper” here is doing a lot of work. Yes, it’s cheaper, meaning that it allows you to ship more stuff faster. You could make the argument that this results in lower quality, but this isn’t always the case. (For example, VS Code feels great!) Still, I’d often rather have twice the features at 80% the quality, instead of an extremely high quality product that doesn’t have the features I need. Cheapness leads…

VSCode is adequate, not great. The bar for responsive and minimal application is so bad these days thanks to web apps.

Re: Closing a 30 pixel gap between native and web

#168

Post by quickthrower2 »

n8cpdx wrote: post #90
GuB-42 wrote: post #86

> installed desktop web apps are really starting to look and feel like native apps I think we are having the opposite problem: native apps are really starting to look and feel like web apps, and in many cases, they are. The problem: the web has a terrible UI toolkit for desktop apps. It has clickable links and basic forms, that's all. It was made for documents, not apps. If you want better than that, you have to rewr…

> Traditional Windows apps all use system provided common controls, because they are good, and therefore they have a consistent look and feel, even through OS updates. This hasn’t been consistent since at least Vista and the release of WPF, which does totally custom control rendering. Circa 2006. I think web is taking over on Windows because any of 10 or 15 different design systems can get you to a better app than th…

This is evidenced by the layers of settings UIs in modern windows from old school systems properties dialog to newfangled display settings, and in between. It is horrible. They just bundle these UIs atop one another there is no overall usability oversight.

Re: Closing a 30 pixel gap between native and web

#169

Post by luvs2code »

MaXtreeM wrote: post #6

With all this Electron and PWA focused development a cannot shake a feeling that we add an extra layer of a "runtime" on top of an operating system, that could be avoided. An extra layer which occupies RAM space and processor time which feels unnecessary but it is where we are headed. I wonder if the reason is simple, that we (myself included) have not provided anything better or the reason is that big corporations w…

I'm gradually starting to see X11/Xlib as a solution for cross platform desktop apps. It is the native GUI API for most UNIX operating systems. Ports exist for Windows(win11) and Mac which makes X11 technically portable to them as well.

Its not exactly an elegant solution I have to admit. But the licensing problems with QT make a lot of people nervous, GTK seems to be pretty polarizing, and for whatever reason WxWidgets and FLTK never really got much adoption/didn't progress very far.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-...

Re: Closing a 30 pixel gap between native and web

#170

Post by Falkon1313 »

drekipus wrote: post #150
quotemstr wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome doesn't have menu accelerators in the window menu though, so "alt-spc n" does nothing: the alt-spc brings up the window menu, but the n doesn't activate "minimize". This interaction not functioning in Gnome keeps me off Gnome entirely.

super+h minimises. pretty sure you can make it anything you want. if you're looking specifically for "alt-spc n" to minimise I'm sure you can find a way to make that work - but why? to retain muscle memory between windows and gnome?

My keyboard doesn't have a 'super' key. What does that translate to on a normal keyboard?
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