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ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

todesktop.com

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Re: ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

#11

Post by ToucanLoucan »

I'll be honest: I make a concentrated effort to avoid these apps that are just a website stuffed into a (usually quite gigantic) executable for a number of reasons:

- They always feel sluggish. Animations are jittery. Text input that does things (contextual search for example) jitters and jumps instead of smoothly performing it's task.

- Scrolling, especially scrolling that loads content, is also often jittery and laggy, if it doesn't just stop working abruptly and require a reload.

- I can't help but feel it's incredibly unnecessary for these apps to be as MASSIVE as they are. Usually several hundred megabytes at a go. I know storage is cheap these days but I own several games on steam that aren't that pudgy on the disk.

I just don't like them. Every time I download a new app and I realize it's electron or node or react or whatever the new shiny framework is everyone likes, I will remove it unless I absolutely 100% need it to perform a task. And I will likely be groaning and complaining the entire time as I listen to my PC clock up it's fans to deal with running 150MB of bloody javascript to show it's UI.

I know this is largely a me problem, I'm aware of that. But I just don't like them. And especially given that a whole lot of these apps aren't built by scrappy underdog devs but massive firms that could extremely easily afford native developers... I dunno. It rubs me the wrong way.

Like I don't know how else to say this: If you want to make software, make software. If you want to make websites, make websites. Stop trying to make software out of website tools.

Re: ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

#12

Post by slara »

resonious wrote: post #5

I gotta say, I'm not super convinced by a lot of the points on here. > Native notifications Web browsers already let you create these. > Auto updates Browsers usually already do this too! And also they will fetch your app fresh on each visit by default... So I'm not sure why this is a problem we need to solve for web apps. > Native installers So, more friction? Just visiting the webpage was too simple? Anyway some of…

>> Native installers

>So, more friction? Just visiting the webpage was too simple?

I've been asked several times by the sales team to add an installer to our web app. They think this adds a feeling of ownership to the user.

Re: ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

#13

Post by franga2000 »

dusted wrote: post #6

Stop trying to make desktop software with web technologies, they are all slower and suckier than their counterparts. I'm not saying it's impossible to make a good native app with web technologies, only that you can _ALWAYS_ make a better one using native tech.

I hate Electron apps as much as the next guy, but I'll take a cross-platform wrapped web app any day over a native app that is available only on Windows because the developers didn't have the time do make three separate apps.

Re: ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

#14

Post by stevepike »

dusted wrote: post #6

Stop trying to make desktop software with web technologies, they are all slower and suckier than their counterparts. I'm not saying it's impossible to make a good native app with web technologies, only that you can _ALWAYS_ make a better one using native tech.

So I'm sitting here on a linux (KDE) desktop machine with the following apps open:

1. Slack 2. Discord 3. Signal 4. Mullvad VPN 5. Kate 6. 1Password 7. Emacs 8. Chrome 9. Spotify 10. Konsole

How many of these wouldn't exist on Linux if they had to be written with native SDKs? Konsole and Kate use QT and are clearly the best UX, but it's not like emacs (gtk) integrates natively in KDE any better than Slack does. Zoom is clearly the worst experience of all of them, and I think that's actually a QT app?

Re: ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

#15

Post by etskinner »

dusted wrote: post #6

Stop trying to make desktop software with web technologies, they are all slower and suckier than their counterparts. I'm not saying it's impossible to make a good native app with web technologies, only that you can _ALWAYS_ make a better one using native tech.

This is true. One thing people have trouble with, though, is committing time to develop a desktop version of their app. So the shortcut is tempting, but you're right that it's not ideal. Often, a poor desktop app is better than nothing.

Re: ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

#16

Post by loremchecksum »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #11

I'll be honest: I make a concentrated effort to avoid these apps that are just a website stuffed into a (usually quite gigantic) executable for a number of reasons: - They always feel sluggish. Animations are jittery. Text input that does things (contextual search for example) jitters and jumps instead of smoothly performing it's task. - Scrolling, especially scrolling that loads content, is also often jittery and la…

I sometimes wonder what the total emission cost of these non-native developments amounts to.

Re: ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

#17

Post by kevsim »

Unsolicited praise - we've been using ToDesktop at Kitemaker for a while now and we're super happy with it. The team is always super responsive to our requests and the product has been very stable. We were rolling our own Electron app before and it was an annoying headache. Just having a tool that takes care of all the updates, Apple signing and is consistently adding new/useful APIs for us to tap into is a big win. I get that some teams aren't interested in having an Electron app, and that's cool, but if you are, give this a shot because it'll for sure save you time.

Re: ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

#18

Post by cageface »

dusted wrote: post #6

Stop trying to make desktop software with web technologies, they are all slower and suckier than their counterparts. I'm not saying it's impossible to make a good native app with web technologies, only that you can _ALWAYS_ make a better one using native tech.

I've been developing a desktop app in Flutter and so far my experience has been quite positive. It uses a fraction of the disk space and memory that a comparable electron app would and it's overall a much nicer UI toolkit than html.
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