Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Sheets is a big one. It really does seem like CRUD when compared ti Excel.
Desktop or web Excel?
Desktop.
Web apps are better than no apps
141–150 of 199 posts
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#142Sorry, but Electron wrapped application should not be considered a "web app". It's a web app and a browser in a bundle. Web apps, added to desktop or homescreen is in whole different league, as they do not require additional runtime, and main runtime always gets all security patches. RAM usage depends on complexity of application. While Chrome, Edge and Safari already support adding PWA web apps to desktop, why are we still bundling them into Electron wrappers?
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#143One 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…
Absolutely. For anything internet-based (social media, chat, meetings etc.) web apps are vastly superior for this reason. In fact, anything which doesn't explicitly need the richness of a true desktop GUI (e.g. Photoshop or games) should probably be a web app. In addition to the massive benefit of running browser-sandboxed, web apps are also: 1. Easier to start and stop (open/close a tab) 2. Less permanent (clear you…
Even mobile apps have much more finely grained privacy and security controls and sandboxing. It feels like we should have multiple classes of browser apps - consumer apps (Discord, Slack, Spotify, Steam, etc) that are more mobile-like in their explicit permissions and dev tools that carry warnings for their largely unbounded behavior. Or perhaps even have “dev mode” on your machine that opens up access to system processes etc, that is both opt in and timeboxed (I.e. enable dev mode for 8 hours).
It’s also weird how I still go to, to me, random websites to download these apps (I trust Spotify.com, but having users google “Spotify” to find an app is ripe for supply chain attacking). The only time I ever visit some of these websites is to download their desktop app. In some sense, gaming has sort of figured this out as most everything comes through one of a handful of platforms nowadays (steam, gog, epic, etc).
I’m sure there are lots of solutions here but I think the current state definitely could be significantly improved.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#144> Of course, Notion is a complex app by itself, but in comparison, the native app for Apple Notes usually takes around just 120Mb for me.
Anyone else surprised that Apple Notes takes up 120mb? That... sounds like an electron app to me.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#145Did this 'article' make anyone else's antenna twitch? Firstly, there's something about the combination of saying nothing new and adding very little opinion, plus a few writing/editorial oddities, makes me wonder if this is GPT-generated? Or at best, it's just comms copy from a non-specialist, banging something out in a hurry. (Noting that the author is COO of a 'communication agency'.) Secondly, given how uninteresti…
GPT-generated articles are extremely common now. It doesn't surprise me one bit. It's just a cheap way for the "author" to build his online presence with minimum effort.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sorry, not even remotely close. I want to see some serious evidence. There was this blog post of a company trying improve their clients' webpage performance by incrementally migrating them from JS to WASM/Rust: https://zaplib.com/docs/blog_post_mortem.html In short, their idea failed. Those rewrites did not yield the "orders of magnitude" perf improvements that they were hoping for. A quote from the article: > Rust…
Comparing WASM and JS is fine. Claiming JS has the same performance as Java or Go is not. JS also has had decades of optimizations. So if WASM with essentially no optimization is just as fast as JS, that's a huge interoperability win.
> > Around the speed of Java and Go in some cases …
> Claiming JS has the same performance as …
"in some cases"
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. For anything internet-based (social media, chat, meetings etc.) web apps are vastly superior for this reason. In fact, anything which doesn't explicitly need the richness of a true desktop GUI (e.g. Photoshop or games) should probably be a web app. In addition to the massive benefit of running browser-sandboxed, web apps are also: 1. Easier to start and stop (open/close a tab) 2. Less permanent (clear you…
Even mobile apps have much more finely grained privacy and security controls and sandboxing. It feels like we should have multiple classes of browser apps - consumer apps (Discord, Slack, Spotify, Steam, etc) that are more mobile-like in their explicit permissions and dev tools that carry warnings for their largely unbounded behavior. Or perhaps even have “dev mode” on your machine that opens up access to system proc…
Centralizing everything into app stores benefits our corporate overlords more than anyone else. It gets even worse when every approved app has to depend on the platform's API. The privacy and security issues still exist, but now developers and users have to pay to for an untrusted app.
Web apps don't have any of those problems.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even mobile apps have much more finely grained privacy and security controls and sandboxing. It feels like we should have multiple classes of browser apps - consumer apps (Discord, Slack, Spotify, Steam, etc) that are more mobile-like in their explicit permissions and dev tools that carry warnings for their largely unbounded behavior. Or perhaps even have “dev mode” on your machine that opens up access to system proc…
Centralizing everything into app stores benefits our corporate overlords more than anyone else. It gets even worse when every approved app has to depend on the platform's API. The privacy and security issues still exist, but now developers and users have to pay to for an untrusted app. Web apps don't have any of those problems.
Neither do Linux distros
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#149Honestly you’re damned no matter which move you make unless you have the dedicated teams to build out for every platform.
If you build for native Mac, windows and Linux users will be disappointed they can’t use it.
If you build it using electron (or similar) so that you can support all these platforms, lots will complain that it is bloated.
If you built it as a desktop app then those who want it on mobile will complain.
I do think web apps, especially with the power of PWAs, are the best starting point for most projects unless you know it obviously won’t be a fit. It isn’t going to make everyone happy, but at least it does give you the widest coverage of where people can use it.
Re: Web apps are better than no apps
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not talking about windows and iPhones though, iPhone users are buying iPads, why would they buy an android tablet?
If anything, it's tech world that has less brand loyalty. I have an apple, windows, and android.
The average tech user though? They're probably going all in on one