Web app must be there if you want invited people to instantly be able to join and see something.
And if you already have a web app, why not wrap it in Cordova to make the native app?
Web apps are better than no apps
111–120 of 199 posts
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#112> Unfortunately, the actual choice is about having an app or not, and I’d rather take something over nothing.
Not yet, it's not. At least for the applications that I use (outside of work), I haven't had to settle for a web app yet, fortunately. At work, I have no choice but to use a couple.
It's not a given that I'd prefer a web app over nothing, personally. Being a web app is a serious downside, and I could see many situations where I'd just use nothing instead. It all depends on what my actual needs are.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> JavaScript isn't as fast as C++ or Rust, but it's pretty fast. Around the speed of Java and Go in some cases, which are compiled. Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence. JS id as unoptimizable as can be, thanks to its hyper dynamic nature. And js developers without any clue about memory will happily allocate hundreds of thousands of unnecessary objects to save a line of code. Completely…
Quake 1 (about 100k lines of C) runs in the browser just fine: https://www.netquake.io/quake Yes, it's a 30 year old game but the typical CRUD web app doesn't have close to the complexity of quake. Good C++ code is significantly faster than JS, that's true, but JS is also much, much faster than you'd think.
That quake demo is surely running on the WASM runtime which isn't really related to JavaScript: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebAssembly
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#114I don't get what's all the hate around Electron apps to be honest. I run VS Code, Slack, Discord, Spotify (not Electron, but web tech) all the time and I don't see problems[1]. I mainly use a 7 year old mac, nothing too beefy. No, I wouldn't like to use a website instead. But I don't crave an actual native app that much either. [1] Perhaps apart from Discord always updating itself, but that's their decision.
Slack has to be the clunkiest, slowest app I have ever used. It makes visual studio seem fast.
Electron apps are the hill I want to die on.
It is against hacker ethos, incredibly slow and bloated, and teaches devs features are the only thing which matters and not how much memory or cpu runtime it uses.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are saying if they have say an iphone and an android (tablet?), the same app should behave the same. Contrary to you, some people could not care less about "consistency" of different apps that have different UIs and do different things anyway.
Where is this magical market that has an iPhone AND Android tablet? I would wager that ihat is a pretty rare user, and even rarer to be using the same native apps on both.
Leave tech world and look at what people have. Most iPhone users have Windows machines.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#116The reason I prefer web apps (running in the browser, not in Electron) is because companies push for native apps so aggressively that it's extremely obvious that native apps make it easier to mine my private data for profit, including on mobile.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#117Not a fan of Electron or native-ified apps in general but I usually have a very easy decision matrix:
If it's one of my main productivity drivers (IDE, Browser, E-Mail, Messenger, Note-taking app, whatever) it can be massive and I am willing to update it constantly.
If it's a tiny tool that sometimes offers one functionality and otherwise sits in the tray: No, I don't want it to gobble up 200MB of RAM if you can quite literally draw the window and the 5 checkboxes and 3 buttons with 30 lines of WINAPI code. I might have 10 of these running, a browser-based UI does not make sense for this, yet people keep doing it. Electron is good at UIs, if I only open the UI once per month (but the app is running 24/7) it should optimize for resource usage, not developer happiness.
Some things are in between, even for me. Music player: I prefer foobar2000 or the likes, no images, just a list of songs I can doubleclick. Not a web app. A text editor that does not render mark down, is not an IDE, etc.pp. Not a web app. But for some people these can be really feature rich, not for me.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#118> There are just too many levels, and JavaScrip is an interpreted language, not a compiled one, so by default, it will be orders of magnitude slower than an app written in Swift, Rust, or C++. JavaScript isn't as fast as C++ or Rust, but it's pretty fast. Around the speed of Java and Go in some cases, which are compiled. For a web app the speed of the language is rarely the bottleneck anyway, other than some exceptio…
> JavaScript isn't as fast as C++ or Rust, but it's pretty fast. Around the speed of Java and Go in some cases, which are compiled.
Indeed, JS is pretty darn fast.
Not because of innate characteristics, but because of the human-centuries spent optimizing JIT VMs.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#119One thing that makes me use a web-app rather than a native one on PC is that I know for a fact that the browser app will be very limited in tampering with my computer, something I'm not so sure about when installing native applications. Often I see Nvidia's or Microsoft's or Discord's own services snooping in my installed applications, but it can go much further with, e.g., applications like grammarly that have acces…
> One thing that makes me use a web-app rather than a native one on PC is that I know for a fact that the browser app will be very limited in tampering with my computer, something I'm not so sure about when installing native applications.
I see this as more of a failing on the part of desktop OSes than anything. I know a lot of more technically inclined folks are used to the programs they run having access to all the same things they do and may even prefer that, but it’s been proven countless times over that large commercial devs will abuse this access however they can.
It’s because of this that I’m not nearly as upset by things like macOS app sandboxing as some seem to be. It’s nice to have the assurance that these apps can’t poke their noses anywhere that I haven’t explicitly allowed them to.
Unfortunately I don’t know when sandboxing will become the norm on the dominant desktop platform (Windows) where it’d make the most positive impact. Sandboxing breaks all sorts of dev assumptions and thus backwards compatibility, which is something of a sacred cow in the Windows world.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#120> There are just too many levels, and JavaScrip is an interpreted language, not a compiled one, so by default, it will be orders of magnitude slower than an app written in Swift, Rust, or C++. JavaScript isn't as fast as C++ or Rust, but it's pretty fast. Around the speed of Java and Go in some cases, which are compiled. For a web app the speed of the language is rarely the bottleneck anyway, other than some exceptio…
> JavaScript isn't as fast as C++ or Rust, but it's pretty fast. Around the speed of Java and Go in some cases, which are compiled. Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence. JS id as unoptimizable as can be, thanks to its hyper dynamic nature. And js developers without any clue about memory will happily allocate hundreds of thousands of unnecessary objects to save a line of code. Completely…
> Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence.
Funny that you say "not even remotely close" while providing zero evidence yourself, but then ask other people to present their evidence.
https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
There you go. There's the evidence. No goalpost-moving, please.
For evidence that Javascript can be used to build large, production-quality applications, see coldtea's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37568707