Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

rogueengine.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 384 posts

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#41

Post by Ntrails »

ctippett wrote: post #4

I sympathise, but talking to my sister I've come to appreciate a different point of view. I have an "app", a PWA, that she says she cannot find because it's not in the App Store. Despite telling her it's available as a website, this seems too much... she just doesn't use — or is comfortable using — Safari.

I dislike apps and avoid installing them in general terms. They're bloated and frankly I have better things to store on my phone (mostly music, but also photos, conversation histories etc). I do not need an "app" for submitting a form. Looking at a website. etc etc

My favourite thing about using a website? It can't send me attention grabbing notifications. It can't harass me for perms.

I'm 100% an outlier. My friends don't blink twice to install all manor of loyalty, news, social media, lifestyle, games etc etc and rarely clean up. It's all just choices and preferences - the world does not suit me.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#42

Post by nottorp »

noam_compsci wrote: post #21
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #10

> Platforms like Poki and CrazyGames, with a combined 95 million players a month, are leading the charge in, what I like to call, the Browser Games Renaissance. I'm probably not the target market, but my first impression of Poki is that it's absolute trash; it looks like a shopfront for the lowest quality mobile games I can imagine. The first thing I tried was a block-puzzler that involved drag-and-drop to move piece…

Agreed I’d rather spend more time on itch. But from a dev perspective poki has a chance to monetise while itch monetisation is near zero at the moment.

That's a good thing for the customers though.

When the original article is talking about escaping the tyranny of the app store it sounds to me like they don't want to share the loot box revenue with Apple/Google, like our chinese friends at Epic.

Unfortunately for them, there are still pay once real games. Some of the good indies are on itch.io indeed.

Stop calling lootbox dispensers "games" please. I prefer paying for a game in advance instead of being monetized.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#43

Post by mvladic »

rubymamis wrote: post #22

While the web platform is catching up due to the continuous supply of abstractions by modern browsers, once you must deviate from those abstractions, you quickly find yourself needing to implement something yourself that is much less efficient than a native implementation. I wrote about developing my own block editor from scratch[1] using C++ and QML after finding that Notion (and so many other web apps) are extremel…

Obsidian is an Electron app (I don't know if it belongs to the Block editor category). It loads just as fast as your app. I tried copying and pasting the text file War and Peace (66035 lines) from Notepad into both apps and, interestingly, Obsidian is slightly faster. Also, scrolling through this large chunk of text is slightly faster on Obsidian, too. Obsidian memory consumption (4 processes) is 172 MB and Daino Notes consumption (1 process) is 352.7 MB. Tested on Windows 11 PC.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#44

Post by BlueTemplar »

Please stop making web apps, the web is for documents, not to be hijacked by Google in their attempt to wrestle personal computing from Microsoft.

This issue becomes even worse if you try to make software that can both be used with keyboard & mouse and on a small touchscreen. With very few exceptions, you end up with something that works poorly with both interfaces, instead of working great on one of them. Trying to do that in a browser rather than the OS only makes the issue worse (what happens when you press "Alt" ?).

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#45

Post by ANewFormation »

tetrisgm wrote: post #35

One aspect I find fascinating and under estimated is how Apple makes the browser kind of secondary to apps. The browser is basically a navigator, a renderer of websites. People don’t think of the web as a platform for apps. For them, it’s like a bunch of pages you get to via Google. They have very poor notions of how to navigate or make workflows with it. How many people do you know who just have a million tabs open?…

Are you trying to tell me there are people without a million tabs open?

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#47

Post by rubymamis »

mvladic wrote: post #43
rubymamis wrote: post #22

While the web platform is catching up due to the continuous supply of abstractions by modern browsers, once you must deviate from those abstractions, you quickly find yourself needing to implement something yourself that is much less efficient than a native implementation. I wrote about developing my own block editor from scratch[1] using C++ and QML after finding that Notion (and so many other web apps) are extremel…

Obsidian is an Electron app (I don't know if it belongs to the Block editor category). It loads just as fast as your app. I tried copying and pasting the text file War and Peace (66035 lines) from Notepad into both apps and, interestingly, Obsidian is slightly faster. Also, scrolling through this large chunk of text is slightly faster on Obsidian, too. Obsidian memory consumption (4 processes) is 172 MB and Daino Not…

Obsidian is not a block editor. Can you put a Kanban or any other complex block in the middle of a document? From my understanding, you can't. Here's how to think of it: a block editor is a basically a virtualized list with dynamic loading, so it can load any arbitrary component *while* allowing the user to interact with the list as it was a singular piece of document - so you get text selection between these discrete blocks, editing, etc like you would in a regular text editor.

Again, from my understanding, Obsidian is not that. If I remember correctly it is based on CodeMirror which is designed to only handle (EDIT: rich) text.

Edit (addendum): BTW, I'm not sure your Obsidian RAM reading is correct, an empty instance of Obsidian with one note uses 285MB (all 4 processes together) on my machine (M1).

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#48

Post by mvladic »

rubymamis wrote: post #47
mvladic wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obsidian is an Electron app (I don't know if it belongs to the Block editor category). It loads just as fast as your app. I tried copying and pasting the text file War and Peace (66035 lines) from Notepad into both apps and, interestingly, Obsidian is slightly faster. Also, scrolling through this large chunk of text is slightly faster on Obsidian, too. Obsidian memory consumption (4 processes) is 172 MB and Daino Not…

Obsidian is not a block editor. Can you put a Kanban or any other complex block in the middle of a document? From my understanding, you can't. Here's how to think of it: a block editor is a basically a virtualized list with dynamic loading, so it can load any arbitrary component *while* allowing the user to interact with the list as it was a singular piece of document - so you get text selection between these discret…

Here is the screenshot showing memory consumption of Obsidian (I did wait 30 seconds for memory to settle down after initial spike which was 240 MB): https://pasteboard.co/uW2lPNSbL7f7.png

[EDIT] Here is memory consumption of Daino Notes: https://pasteboard.co/z5pciLoh99i6.png

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#49

Post by rubymamis »

mvladic wrote: post #48
rubymamis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obsidian is not a block editor. Can you put a Kanban or any other complex block in the middle of a document? From my understanding, you can't. Here's how to think of it: a block editor is a basically a virtualized list with dynamic loading, so it can load any arbitrary component *while* allowing the user to interact with the list as it was a singular piece of document - so you get text selection between these discret…

Here is the screenshot showing memory consumption of Obsidian (I did wait 30 seconds for memory to settle down after initial spike which was 240 MB): https://pasteboard.co/uW2lPNSbL7f7.png [EDIT] Here is memory consumption of Daino Notes: https://pasteboard.co/z5pciLoh99i6.png

This is what I get with an *empty* vault: https://pasteboard.co/N3IdNUKUUNKq.png

EDIT: Btw, I do have plans to cut RAM usage significantly in Daino Notes (I focused more on load time and responsiveness). But getting back to my point - I can do these optimizations because those RAM inefficiencies are a result of my code, not some abstractions I can't change.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#50

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #40
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but I also think there's nothing wrong with calling it an "app" if that's the buzzword that will tip some people from dismissing it towards trying it out.

If it's clear that people expect 'apps' to be in the app store, how can you think "there's nothing wrong" with calling PWA's 'apps'?

OK, "there's nothing wrong with calling a PWA an 'app' in most contexts, unless the person listening to you is likely to try to search for the PWA in an app store".
Post reply on HN