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

I’m done with the web

randyluecke.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 291 posts

Re: I’m done with the web

#271

Post by dreamfactory »

PeterisP wrote: post #174
corresation wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more to heaven and earth than data presentation and consumption. I do my banking in a browser. I do my email in a browser. I manage photos in a browser. I manage relationships in a browser. I do my taxes in a browser. I order goods in a browser. I ship goods in a browser. I reserve items at the library in a browser. I watch movies in a browser. I listen to music in a browser. I push apps to my smartphone in a…

I do my interactions with my bank in a browser, but my bank doesn't do the actual banking in a browser. I could manage my photos in a browser, but I won't do "photoshopping" in a browser. I watch movies in a browser, but I don't edit my home movies in a browser. I listen to music in a browser, but I don't record or mix music in a browser. I push apps to my smartphone in a browser, but I don't develop smartphone apps…

Enterprise B2B has started moving very strongly towards web-based apps in the last couple of years e.g. Salesforce

Re: I’m done with the web

#272

Post by pifflesnort »

dreamfactory wrote: post #270
w0utert wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I do my banking in a browser. I do my email in a browser. I manage photos in a browser. I manage relationships in a browser. I do my taxes in a browser. I order goods in a browser. I ship goods in a browser. I reserve items at the library in a browser. I watch movies in a browser. I listen to music in a browser. I push apps to my smartphone in a browser. I get directions in a browser. I find phone numbers in a bro…

> the fact that e.g. Google Mail (which is a great web application) is considered superior to e.g. something like Sparrow is quite frankly very amazing It's a good example actually. Even considering the less pretty UI, Google Mail is superior to Sparrow precisely because it is web-based. From the user's side, the way it deals with spam and search are two huge functional advantages which would be difficult to impossib…

Why are 'spam and search' difficult-to-impossible in a native app?

For that matter, why are you equating 'the web' and 'server-side'? The standads IMAP protocol stores messages server-side while also enabling effecient server-side search. The standard managesieve protocol implements support for managing server-side filters from remote clients. Tools such as SpamAssassin perform intelligent per-user filtering server-side.

At that point, the only real differences between webmail and native clients are:

- UX

- Native clients use standardized protocols by default.

Re: I’m done with the web

#274

Post by dreamfactory »

pifflesnort wrote: post #272
dreamfactory wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fact that e.g. Google Mail (which is a great web application) is considered superior to e.g. something like Sparrow is quite frankly very amazing It's a good example actually. Even considering the less pretty UI, Google Mail is superior to Sparrow precisely because it is web-based. From the user's side, the way it deals with spam and search are two huge functional advantages which would be difficult to impossib…

Why are 'spam and search' difficult-to-impossible in a native app? For that matter, why are you equating 'the web' and 'server-side'? The standads IMAP protocol stores messages server-side while also enabling effecient server-side search. The standard managesieve protocol implements support for managing server-side filters from remote clients. Tools such as SpamAssassin perform intelligent per-user filtering server-s…

For one thing Spamassassin is quite hopeless compared to Gmail's filter (and yes I have compared). But more to the point I would absolutely equate web with server-side hosted app. For example, if you want to implement decent search it's probably going to be Lucene-based. So if you are just talking thin-client presentation layer, the app isn't really native in any case - the acid test for a non-web app is whether it works without an internet connection. (Other major differences would be ubiquity and maintenance.)

Re: I’m done with the web

#275

Post by w0utert »

dreamfactory wrote: post #270
w0utert wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I do my banking in a browser. I do my email in a browser. I manage photos in a browser. I manage relationships in a browser. I do my taxes in a browser. I order goods in a browser. I ship goods in a browser. I reserve items at the library in a browser. I watch movies in a browser. I listen to music in a browser. I push apps to my smartphone in a browser. I get directions in a browser. I find phone numbers in a bro…

> the fact that e.g. Google Mail (which is a great web application) is considered superior to e.g. something like Sparrow is quite frankly very amazing It's a good example actually. Even considering the less pretty UI, Google Mail is superior to Sparrow precisely because it is web-based. From the user's side, the way it deals with spam and search are two huge functional advantages which would be difficult to impossib…

>> From the user's side, the way it deals with spam and search are two huge functional advantages which would be difficult to impossible in a native app.

You can configure Sparrow (or whatever native e-mail client) to simply connect to your GMail inbox and have all the spam filtering and search capabilities that GMail has. Even the default Mail.app on OS X and iOS (which isn't exactly feature rich otherwise) does this. As much as I like GMail as a service, their web front-end is actually the part I dislike most about it, which is why I almost never use it.

>> And from the vendor's side, the ability to manage updates and monetise through ads are clear benefits which keep the program running.

Well, first of all I don't like ads and I don't care about how service providers can monetize it because it's web-based. I'd much rather pay a monthly fee for the service and/or a one-time price for the app, than having a web UI full of crap I didn't ask for. Not a very strong positive for web-apps. As far as updates are concerned, I understand that a web-based service is much more flexible in that regard, but then again, it's not really hard to have self-updating native applications either.

Re: I’m done with the web

#276

Post by thiagoperes »

boucher wrote: post #178
mjmsmith wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Never got s response" was pretty much the story of what happened to the (not free) Atlas beta. I suspect a certain number of people were just turned off by the way that was handled. (Yes, I realize that Cappuccino is a separate project.)

Yeah, I'm sorry about the way it played out too. Unfortunately, a lot of that was out of our hands.

Just curious, what happened?

I still think Atlas is key to developing in Cappuccino, unless you find another way to autocomplete ObjJ code efficiently.

Cocoa and ObjC only works because XCode does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Re: I’m done with the web

#277

Post by macspoofing »

georgemcbay wrote: post #156
josteink wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way yet another webapp framework, no matter how close it emulates the desktop, is going to gain lots of traction My objection is right here. No need to mix in the Objective-J at all. Microsoft's ASP.NET tried to do this thing, to a surprising amount of success. The context then ofcourse was "Web 1.0" pre-Digg internet and the only other "big thing" being PHP. Microsoft managed to take the whole "Draw a GUI…

Every time I see someone talking about using JavaScript as working "on the raw metal" I die a little bit inside. I'm joining OP's web haters club, if he starts one.

The metaphor is apt. JS is a terrible terrible language (with some nice features). It's very easy to do the wrong thing. It's very hard to organize large projects and it needs higher level frameworks to be usable and portable. And with projects like asm.js it will be a necessity (not an option) to write in a higher-level language in order to generate performant JS web apps. So the "raw metal" metaphor is apt.

Re: I’m done with the web

#278

Post by marizmelo »

I remember to look at Cappuccino and say - WOW, this will change everything (again). But then suddenly nothing happened. No articles, no tutorials on peers, no visible discussions, etc. Things became worst when Motorola bought 280north. That was a deal breaker for me. Uncertainty about the library future.

Re: I’m done with the web

#279

Post by [deleted] »

martinced wrote: post #11

There's no way yet another webapp framework, no matter how close it emulates the desktop, is going to gain lots of traction when it mandates users to use... Objective-J and JavaScript. Seriously: being on your high horses and all is fine and well but your article is an oversimplification as to how the web works and as to what devs need and want. For example lately I've been very interested in flapjax (FRP UI) and web…

[deleted]

Re: I’m done with the web

#280

Post by ttrt »

Joeri wrote: post #252
johnbender wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the post differently. I think he was simply pointing out the fact that we've stagnated at the same level of abstraction in the web space for a long time. Cappuccino is just the example he's using to point out where we were relative to where we are and in that light it's almost a regression. For the purposes of his larger argument, the way that Cappuccino delivered its abstractions (Objective-J) isn't as import…

We're stuck at the same level of abstraction because the platform forces us to. The base html/css controls are incredibly simplistic, to the point of being pretty much useless for building proper UI. Everyone is struggling with how to abstract their way around this fact. You have solutions like gwt, cappucino and extjs which build custom ui components that behave properly, ad the infrastructure to tie them together.…

Thanks for a fascinating comment! Do you have any opinion on the parenscript project? http://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/
Post reply on HN