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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

#61

Post by davej »

devmor wrote: post #51
davej wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) What are the "plugins" a pro subscription gives me. I could only see info on filesystem access in the docs. > 2) Likewise, what is the "restricted API" that pro subscription brings. We have a bunch of plugins and are adding more all the time. Currently we have: * Active Window - Retrieve app metadata from the currently-active window of the OS. * Selected Text - Retrieve the currently-selected text from any appli…

>We don't currently block apps when subs are cancelled (except in cases of abuse) but we will likely do something in the future if a customer has cancelled their subscription but are still actively advertising their app on their site for example. Wow, it'd take a witness stand to get me to admit something like this. Actively seeking a method to stop your former customers from offering their finished product because t…

To clarify: we host the initial download of the app on our CDN so we would most likely block the initial download of the app. It seems pretty reasonable to me that if a customer doesn't pay for a sub then they can no longer offer it as a download to their customers.

Re: ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

#62

Post by devmor »

davej wrote: post #61
devmor wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We don't currently block apps when subs are cancelled (except in cases of abuse) but we will likely do something in the future if a customer has cancelled their subscription but are still actively advertising their app on their site for example. Wow, it'd take a witness stand to get me to admit something like this. Actively seeking a method to stop your former customers from offering their finished product because t…

To clarify: we host the initial download of the app on our CDN so we would most likely block the initial download of the app. It seems pretty reasonable to me that if a customer doesn't pay for a sub then they can no longer offer it as a download to their customers.

That is much less horrible than your wording made it sound - so if a customer is hosting the download on their own website, you are not trying to stop that in any way, correct?

Re: ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

#63

Post by davej »

gwbas1c wrote: post #54
davej wrote: post #24

Oh wow, It's exciting to see this pop up on HN. I'm Dave, founder of ToDesktop. Feel free to reply to this and I'm happy to answer any questions :).

> Is ToDesktop For Me? > If you want to make a desktop app of a website for your personal use, ToDesktop is overkill. I just want to point out that a lot of us "pros" learn how to use tools like this by semi-personal use. Therefore, you might want to consider a free personal version that's crippled in a mildly annoying way: For example, no installer, don't sign the app, and have an easily-ignorable nag. (Therefore cr…

> Therefore, you might want to consider a free personal version that's crippled in a mildly annoying way: For example, no installer, don't sign the app, and have an easily-ignorable nag. (Therefore creating a situation where if I tried to distribute one of these applications for a commercial product it looks unprofessional.)

We basically do this. You can download ToDesktop Builder and create an app for free on your computer. You just can't sign it and distribute it to your customers.

This is a good point though. We will make it more clear on our landing page.

Re: ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

#64

Post by davej »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #45
davej wrote: post #24

Oh wow, It's exciting to see this pop up on HN. I'm Dave, founder of ToDesktop. Feel free to reply to this and I'm happy to answer any questions :).

Good luck, Dave. For myself, I develop native (Swift) apps for Apple devices, and have not found hybrid approaches practical in my own work, but there have been great points made by folks from all sides, in this post.

Thanks for the kind words Chris! I completely agree.

Re: ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

#65

Post by asoneth »

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…

> 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 understand why someone would think that, but in my experience the economics for product owners aren't significantly different between scrappy underdogs and massive firms.

First, most new products start as a web app. If the product is profitable (or convinces someone with money that it will be profitable) the product owner is granted additional headcount to allocate.

In my experience, adding more user-requested functionality almost always has a higher expected return on investment than making fully native versions of the product for iOS, Android, or Windows. (I have no experience making software for Mac.) As much as I like using native apps myself, there are plenty of cases where I couldn't make a case that creating native versions would have a positive return on investment at all.

In summary, the number of products that are profitable enough to afford native development teams is small, and the number of those products where the native development team would pay for itself in increased profits is smaller still.

There are plenty of exceptions like games, legacy software, realtime systems, libre software, low-level utilities, Mac-only dev shops etc. But otherwise the economics don't seem to work out.

Re: ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

#66

Post by egonschiele »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #50
egonschiele wrote: post #19

This looks interesting to me, but the cheapest tier is $99/month. Why is it so expensive? Isn't this just building an Electron app for you?

This is aimed at people who lack the ability to do that. Lots of not so technical people that operate small websites that don't employ developers. If you know what you are doing, making websites is easy. But most people don't and that's why things like wordpress, squarespace, webflow, tumblr, medium, substack, etc. exist.

To that point, though, aren't those services $10 - $30 per month? If they're able to sell this for $99 - $240/month, surely they'll see competition, leading to a race to the bottom?

Re: ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

#67

Post by bentt »

toddmorey wrote: post #53
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 think web tech (even as resource hungry as it tends to be) is the right abstraction until your product & team is big enough to properly staff and develop for each platform. Looking at you, Slack. It's time to step up to native. I look at it this way: Any app deploying to four platforms (web, Mac, Linux, Windows) is going to involve some level of non-native abstraction. (Whatever Adobe seems doing for their UI kit i…

Agreed that this is on the browser makers. Not sure how the incentives align if the desktop version is actully an offline experience. Advertising and tracking might be compromised?

Re: ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

#69

Post by lefixx »

philote wrote: post #57
devmor wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't know PWAs exist due to poor platform support/advertisement.

What do you mean by poor platform support?

Mozilla prism has been discontinued. Firefox first removed the feature by default and then removed it completely. IOS-add-to-home-screen always sucked.

We deserve a better SSB implementation. Stuff like 1-click-install would be dead simple if a browser would do it properly. Notifications, multiple instances, extensions and without the overhead from atom or toDesktop or whatever.

Re: ToDesktop – Web app to desktop app in minutes

#70

Post by BaseballPhysics »

jcul wrote: post #36
stevepike wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Slightly off topic, bit is Signal a web app? I haven't realized.

It's Electron-based, yes. Anyone using it on Wayland with fractional scaling will know that...
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