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Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

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Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#111

Post by Kinrany »

juunpp wrote: post #82
s1k3s wrote: post #55

I strongly disagree with most of the points in this article. Why does he blame small app developers for vendor lock-in? Why is everyone casually avoiding the fact that vendor lock-in comes from.. vendors? You think I want to rewrite the same app 3 times for it to work on Apple, Google and Microsoft systems? When is the last time these 3 major platform owners have done anything but locking you in their ecosystem? Such…

I don't even know what the argument is either. Vendor lock-in on behalf of Apple, Google, and Microsoft, sure. But then: > but all frameworks are guilty. Electron, Capacitor, Tauri, Xamarin, Qt, NativeScript, the lot. Well, these all solve entirely different problems. Different problems, different solutions. Not sure what the "lock-in" is here. It's like arguing that there is "lock-in" because one project is written…

> It's like arguing that there is "lock-in" because one project is written in C# and the other in Javascript. Seems like stretching the concept of "lock-in" too thin.

This is absolutely an instance of lock-in. An ecosystem grows faster when it can borrow from other ecosystems but doesn't allow doing the same. This is exactly the same problem: there is no good FFI, so we have to write M libraries times N languages.

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#112

Post by dvdkon »

scarface74 wrote: post #49
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don't actually want cross-platform apps at all, but either single-platform apps, or apps developed independently for both platforms (because otherwise you're just talking about some in-house cross-platform toolkit).

Why do I as a Mac user care about cross platform apps? Even as a long time Windows user, why would I care about cross platform apps? I chose a platform because the platform and the apps meet my set of priorities. As far as how that affects Linux users, even if I did prefer Linux as a developer platform, why make it my daily driver instead of running it in a VM or with something like WSL2?

I suppose you don't, at least not as a user. But behind app availability, which is a concern for you, is this whole debate about cross-platform apps. It's likely that the only way you get to continue using your preferred platform and some new app/piece of hardware is if the developers use a cross-platform toolkit.

When releasing software, macOS is a small tertiary concern for me at best, behind Linux (for myself), Windows and mobile platforms. So if you care about app availability, you indirectly care about cross-platform toolkits.

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#113

Post by muyuu »

scarface74 wrote: post #83
muyuu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the car mechanics analogy goes very far(tehe) but it could be done with some consumer electronics, as long as the integration and coupling of software and hardware has worked much more against the people than it has benefited them. Granted, it's not for everything. But by losing computing we lost a lot more, too.

How so, I think the modern iPhone works a lot better for most people than my old Apple //e or the first PCs I used ever did.

i don't think you've read the above messages wholly, or if so you have missed the point

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#114

Post by makeitdouble »

ttttt444yeak wrote: post #86
Devasta wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If quality mattered then maybe the other toolkits would have a chance, but no one is looking at the web for that, they are looking to the one advantage that the web has that the others cannot hope to beat: They work around bureaucrats. At least in the enterprise, with desktop applications you need to deal with IT security losers who freak out when you ask that computers actually have useful applications, and god help…

How did things end up this way? I'm massively frustrated by the stupidity of our security team and it gets worse each year. And I've tried to explain this stuff about web apps exactly like you just did but it never quite gets through, and when it does it gets a response like "well, we should probably find a way to restrict web apps as well". I know for a fact that none of the people doing systems administration that…

> "I breached the database, but then got stopped from exfiltrating data because somebody made it so the USB sticks don't work".

It might be a generational thing, at some point I know people actually had Napster running on their work computer, or were torrenting porn movies. That's how the whole Metallica thing happened. That feels absurd to me in today's corporate env., for better or worse the work/private split has really come a long way.

Malware spread by physical media was also a thing for a while, it's not just about the getting stuff out, a lot of the restriction on USB is not getting things in.

PS: on the "why" of all that...I'd say Windows. Platforms all have their weaknesses, but Windows opened the doors wider than anyone else IMHO.

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#115

Post by Devasta »

ttttt444yeak wrote: post #86
Devasta wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If quality mattered then maybe the other toolkits would have a chance, but no one is looking at the web for that, they are looking to the one advantage that the web has that the others cannot hope to beat: They work around bureaucrats. At least in the enterprise, with desktop applications you need to deal with IT security losers who freak out when you ask that computers actually have useful applications, and god help…

How did things end up this way? I'm massively frustrated by the stupidity of our security team and it gets worse each year. And I've tried to explain this stuff about web apps exactly like you just did but it never quite gets through, and when it does it gets a response like "well, we should probably find a way to restrict web apps as well". I know for a fact that none of the people doing systems administration that…

"You cannot be blamed for bad decisions if you make no decisions".

Far easier to say no to everything, that way either your manager takes the blame when they overturn your decision or your are blameless when Shadow IT takes over.

That, and it allows you skip the troublesome business of userstanding user needs.

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#117

Post by [deleted] »

muyuu wrote: post #50
scarface74 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a “sad” lesson that users have preferences that are not in line with developers?

Personally I see the ossified bifurcation between users and developers as a major defeat that perhaps I won't live to see reversed. It was not set in stone that people would be by design dumbed down progressively as computing caught on, rather than assimilated into the computing world as 1st class citizens. In a parallel universe something like the Smalltalk, LISP or Forth machines were widely adopted and the dichoto…

[deleted]

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#119

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

giantrobot wrote: post #87
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some classes of applications, all the developers want is a 2D surface (call it a canvas if you like) to draw on and then they do everything else themselves. This leaves several notable areas of UI/UX to address: 1. menus 2. file browsers 3. text entry 4. notification/tray integration 5. window management These are where "the native experience" (i.e behaving according to guidelines or rules laid down by the platfo…

The differences aren't always surface level aesthetics. Say in a toolkit the text input widgets don't support pasting content. An app using it will behave materially different than any other on the system. Not only that it might look ok but lack functionality necessary to the user. This is not hard to imagine since various UI frameworks have long had issues with different paste board systems on Linux.

> Say in a toolkit the text input widgets don't support pasting content.

That's a bug.

> various UI frameworks have long had issues with different paste board systems on Linux

In my experience on *nix (37 years, going back to SunOS), the paste board systems for X Window are very well defined, and the only UI frameworks that have "long had issues" with them are buggy and not widely used. Are you thinking of something in particular?

Re: Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

#120

Post by polynox »

ttttt444yeak wrote: post #86
Devasta wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If quality mattered then maybe the other toolkits would have a chance, but no one is looking at the web for that, they are looking to the one advantage that the web has that the others cannot hope to beat: They work around bureaucrats. At least in the enterprise, with desktop applications you need to deal with IT security losers who freak out when you ask that computers actually have useful applications, and god help…

How did things end up this way? I'm massively frustrated by the stupidity of our security team and it gets worse each year. And I've tried to explain this stuff about web apps exactly like you just did but it never quite gets through, and when it does it gets a response like "well, we should probably find a way to restrict web apps as well". I know for a fact that none of the people doing systems administration that…

Security teams don't bear the costs of reduced productivity from saying no, but bear all the blame if they make a wrong decision to approve something. So they're heavily incentivized to say no.

Like many principal-agent problems, it requires someone appropriately situated to weigh the costs and benefits.

If that doesn't happen, it gets borne by someone, usually shareholders who pay in reduced profits and eventually capital destruction as these companies get ossified and disrupted.

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