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Goodbye, Native Apps

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Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#101

Post by userbinator »

mikewarot wrote: post #3

I have Lazarus up and running... it's currently taking 32 Megabytes of RAM. It compiles in the blink of an eye, has one of the best possible 2 way GUI builders in the open source world, and I can reach back 30 years into the libraries I wrote in the days of Turbo Pascal 7/MS-DOS and pretty much use them intact. It amazes me how many people went with the .NET bloatware and all that follows it. Of course, 95% of progra…

It's funny to see this comment, because Delphi and such were actually considered rather bloated back in the day --- a basic windowed app with not much in it (like a "Hello World") taking up several hundred KB was not unusual, compared to tens of KB for the MFC equivalent, and a few KB for pure Win32.

...and a computer having 32MB of RAM was considered outrageously luxurious.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#102

Post by ineedasername »

"Older native software used resources in a well organized manner"

That made me laugh a bit. Yes, I tend to agree with other criticisms, although in some ways this type of increased resource usage has been going on forever, so I'm not sure it can be laid purely at the feet of hybrid programs:

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#104

Post by tiew9Vii »

ericmcer wrote: post #89

Memory usage is not that important to users. They would way rather have feature parity and familiar UI across all devices. That’s kinda why the browser is cool...

Memory usage is important to users!

I recently wasted two weeks starting a new contract at a tier one multi billion dollar orginisation unable to do any work as their standard issue laptop where 8gb window machines and they had no availability of other machines. It took two weeks pointing out we can't do any work, our contractor rates they paying us to do nothing and the approaching deadline to make it way up the chain for senior execs to organise machines with 16gb.

If you need to run Docker with a few containers that's several gigs immediately unavailable to the system. Start MS Teams, another gig, visual studio code / intelij, another gig, a browser another gig or so.

Even without running developer tools on a 8gb machine which seems to be standard issue laptops at most office based companies and average non techy person off the street you very quickly hit the memory limits and swapping to disc as you have a handful of small Electron applications open.

Memory usage is extremely important to users just that most users being non technical don't know it and just think their machine is slow.

Running an application in 2020 with the ubiquitous use of Electron my desktop apps seem less responsive, i can run fewer of them, and any sign of bad internet connection my system comes to a halt as all that apps even if only sending metrics block until api requests are complete or timeout vs running them in the background and not blocking ui functionality.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#105

Post by gumby »

pjmlp wrote: post #17
gumby wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For decades people complained that Emacs was huge, bloated, etc. Now there are bigger web pages

Except I don't need an application in 2020 hardware to replicate my Emacs experience in 1995 hardware, with hardly any improvement worth mentioning.

It seems a bit unfair if your computing environment is faster than an 0.0125 MIPS KA-10 though doesn’t it?

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#106

Post by bdcravens »

schwartzworld wrote: post #6

VSCode is a poor example. Its a fully featured IDE, and sure it would be lighter without electron, but it still wouldn't be a lightweight piece of software. I use JetBrains which is not Electron, but also uses it's fair share of ram.

Around 1997 I was able to carry around a copy of Homesite on a floppy and run it in many places, on machines in the neighborhood of 32MB of RAM. It understood multiple languages, you could define additional ones and your own tag fillers using a custom XML syntax, connect to a database to inspect schemas, etc. Not as full featured as VSCode, but it had an amazing amount of functionality.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#107

Post by beached_whale »

benrbray wrote: post #90
emodendroket wrote: post #54

As much as anything else the growth of hybrid apps is a symptom of a couple of things: 1) people now expect apps to run on a million different devices and nobody has the time or resources to develop four or five native apps with feature parity between them 2) progress on UI frameworks is pretty much stalled. Just looking at .NET, because I'm familiar with it and traditionally desktop software has been a big area of c…

Agreed. As the developer of an Electron app, I would jump ship in a heartbeat if a viable alternative emerges. Until then, I'd rather use my time to add new features rather than wrangle multiple implementations of the same app. The core app logic is the same on every operating system, so why on earth should I have to rewrite it three or more times?

I know of people doing C++ backend as an Electron extension. The C++ can be compiled on almost any OS does the non GUI stuff.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#108

Post by FpUser »

Silhouette wrote: post #79
wtallis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, proponents of cross-platform frameworks love to ignore the second half of "look and feel". It's ridiculous to claim that a web app can behave like a native app when even Qt apps still tend to have obvious tells.

The important question is, does that matter ? Slick web apps are taking over the software world, whether the likes of Apple want them to or not. Looking like any specific native platform is less important, if it's even relevant at all, in an era when users are working with different web apps each with their own look-and-feel all the time anyway.

While there are really good looking examples to me the most of web apps do not look slick at all. They're rather extremely unergonomic

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#109

Post by cwyers »

I mean, that Pentium III he shows up top probably cost $900, and even with inflation, a Windows laptop with 4gb of RAM costs $250 off Amazon.com right now. The "low-end PCs" that the author complains are being left out by Electron apps... a lot more people have PCs capable of running VS Code than had PCs that could run the old Borland IDEs back then. Computing is more accessible now, not less.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#110

Post by anthk »

bitwize wrote: post #68
peatmoss wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping” must be an alien sentiment to so many younger techies.

Emacs is an alien phenomenon to younger techies. Who would use an editor that's older than their dad?

They are using an Unix descendant probably as old as his grandpa in their pockets.

TTY's date back to the Victorian era. AUX cables date back to the XIX century, too.

Most silverware design at home date back to 1800-1900.

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