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

Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

quirksmode.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 515 posts

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#411

Post by nucleardog »

yellowapple wrote: post #346
wpietri wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's certainly not what I want to share. One of the things that good video sites provide is context. E.g.: Who made this? What else have they done? How can I find them? Has this been widely seen? What do people say about it? Raw streaming urls don't get me any of that. URLs aren't just pointers to bytestreams. From a user sharing perspective, they're humans pointing to a unique thing. And what they're pointing to i…

You could easily address those concerns without turning what should be a simple video into a clusterfsck of Javascript. For example: https://mytube.com/$username/my_first_video.ogg With such a scheme, you immediately know who made it - $username - and (if this hypothetical mytube.com built a proper website) navigating to mytube.com/$username would return a list of videos (maybe with some additional routes for playlis…

URLs are opaque strings to the typical user.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#412

Post by Joeri »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #372
kenjackson wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You went on to list a bunch of niche app classes except for two: 1) Office suites --> Largely a legacy app suite... and web use is increasing for both Office and due to Google Apps. 2) Media Players -- Playing local media is done by native apps, but that is becoming an increasing niche scenario. I posit that Netflix, Pandora, and YouTube dominate other media players. The most important native app that most people use…

I'm sorry to say, but your definitions of "niche" and "legacy" are extremely heterodox and I can't have much of an argument under these semantic constraints.

By legacy I suspect it is meant that the category is finalized in its current form. All major new software will be web-based, and the only desktop software being made going forwards is the one which was already being made. Office and photoshop aren't goin anywhere soon, but the competitor that replaces them will be web-based.

Not that I think it's particularly true. I think the desktop form factor is going away, but what replaces it is not so much web as it is responsive / adaptive, and web is a subcategory of that, with mobile being another. Having a UI which is only usable through keyboard and mouse sitting behind a desk just doesn't cut it anymore.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#413

Post by haberman »

coldtea wrote: post #390
haberman wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That it almost works like a 2000 era video player, only slower and clunkier? What are you even talking about? If you click on a YouTube link, a video your computer has never seen before is playing in less than five seconds, streaming over the internet. You can instantly seek to any part of the video, even if it hours long. You can speed it up to 2x, or slow it down to 0.25x, without changing the pitch of the sound.…

> What are you even talking about? If you click on a YouTube link, a video your computer has never seen before is playing in less than five seconds, streaming over the internet. Nothing about this is "web" specific. That's just "streaming over the internet" as you said. Lots of native apps do it too (for both music and video, internet radio, iTunes video rentals, etc.). The reason we didn't have this as widespread be…

> Nothing about this is "web" specific.

Moving the goalposts. You were saying that YouTube is a slower and clunkier version of a 2000 native app. Now you're comparing 2015 native vs web.

> native is a superset of what functionality is available in a web sandbox

Web sandboxes have a killer advantage over native: no install.

And if we're talking about native desktop, there's another killer advantage of the web: you don't have to trust the app.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#414

Post by ak39 »

bphogan wrote: post #294
webtards wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is two-fold: it sucks for web developers who end up having to learn a new shitty framework every day, dogshit tools to even work with CSS and JS, endless preprocessor and transpilers, perverted markup and tag hell to support said shitty frameworks and having to deploy massive fuuckton heavy sites for a simple blog post. It also sucks hard for the end users : they can see their whole months mobile data all…

I keep hearing this argument touted, but if you view source on the HN home page it uses tables and a tag. You do not have to learn a new framework to do things on the web. The browsers all seem to support stuff that's worked for years. The problem is that web developers feel the need to learn new things because they fear getting out of date. "oh, dude, I learned React this weekend. It's hot stuff! You need to learn t…

Good points. Talk about anxiety to use HTML tables! :-(

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#415

Post by JoeAltmaier »

sixQuarks wrote: post #400
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Currently I'm running Audacity, Sococo (network conferencing tool; soon to be a web app), NetMon, Outlook, WeatherEye and a few services. Also have 3 browser tabs open. So from here it looks like native apps are winning. Especially since I despise two of the three web apps (TeamCity, Jira) for being laggy, buggy and very slow.

OK, but are you a mainstream consumer? No, you're a developer and have specific needs that are solved better with native desktop software.

True, but ALL the web apps I use are laggy, slow and annoying. Its unlikely that developers have the only bad web apps.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#416

Post by sevenadrian »

snowwrestler wrote: post #236
the8472 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do people say about it? you want to share youtube comments with people? they are a significant value-add to you?

Youtube comments are great for finding out the name of songs in the background of the video.

false, comments are always terrible, including this one.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#417

Post by archagon »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #376
archagon wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think UIKit (and possibly Android, which I haven't worked with) has the right idea: nested, texture-backed views that can render their own content. You might argue that canvas and WebGL nodes in the DOM already serve this role, but I disagree. In their current form, these nodes exist inside the document-based world of the web rather than containing it, an inversion of what I see as the proper hierarchy. This arrang…

Beyond views you need a way to layout them. Would you not be simply reinventing the DOM?

In my experience, HTML-style layout is just horrible for app UI. It's really much better suited for text. On iOS, you can either use autolayout (constraint-based layout) or alternatively perform layout manually, in code, for that purpose.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#418

Post by marssaxman »

nucleardog wrote: post #411
yellowapple wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could easily address those concerns without turning what should be a simple video into a clusterfsck of Javascript. For example: https://mytube.com/$username/my_first_video.ogg With such a scheme, you immediately know who made it - $username - and (if this hypothetical mytube.com built a proper website) navigating to mytube.com/$username would return a list of videos (maybe with some additional routes for playlis…

URLs are opaque strings to the typical user.

So are most other schemes for information organization, but that does not make them inherently less useful.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#419

Post by leonatan »

pavlov wrote: post #389
nostrademons wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Android Studio and XCode will give you usable iOS and Android code from visual layouts. I've found that usually the easiest way to prototype an interface is just to build it for real - it's faster than Photoshop, even. The hard part about X-platform mobile development is that oftentimes you need different product concepts on Android & iOS, because the idioms, best practices, device capabilities, and user expecta…

Both Android Studio and XCode will give you usable iOS and Android code from visual layouts. Well, for some definitions of "usable" and "visual layouts"! Our goal is to make a designer's tool that can output complete, store-ready projects for simple apps and for both platforms. That includes three things that neither Xcode nor Android Studio does: 1) Interface Builder and Android Studio's layout editor are not meant…

I'm sorry, after reading you say "they are now the same because they are flat", I sincerely hope you fail. You are clearly not a designer, yet attempt to market a development tool as such.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#420

Post by sceutre »

zokier wrote: post #391
Too wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The no-install, and especially the sandboxed environment, is an argument that hasn't been discussed much here yet but which i think is a big factor to take into account. Sure, device and browser compatibility is nice but really, being able to open a news site without having to share my contact list, my location and my photo album is what makes the web a no-brainer. If native installs could cater more for this scenari…

Java offered no-install sandboxed apps well before the webapp craze. But of course being based on Java made that attempt quite stillborn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Web_Start

Well it still exists and is actually great for distributing Java desktop apps inside a corporate intranet.

But it never caught on because it was a poor implementation of a dubious idea. It started up many hundreds of time slower that Flash, required you to context shift out of the browser, was pretty ugly, and obfuscated the fact it was getting unrestricted access to your machine behind confusing security dialogs.

I think the underlying programming language was the least of its concerns.

Post reply on HN