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I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

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Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#131

Post by rustcleaner »

zephen wrote: post #69
ryandrake wrote: post #17

Almost all of Patrick's points are great if your software development goal is to make a buck . They don't seem to matter if you're writing open source, and I'd argue that desktop apps are still relevant and wonderful in the open source world. I just started a new hobby project, and am doing it as a cross-platform, non-Electron, desktop app because that's what I like to develop. The onboarding funnel: Only a concern i…

Agreed. And his point about randomly moving buttons to see if people like it better? No fucking thanks. The last thing I need is an app made of quicksand.

God damn that drives me up a wall! Mozilla is a terrible offender in this regard, but there are myriad others too!

The user interface is your contract with your users: don't break muscle memory! I would ditch FF-derivatives, but I'm held hostage by them because the good privacy browsers are based on FF.

Stop following fads! Be like craigslist: never change, or if you do then think long and hard about not moving things around! Also if you're a web/mobile developer, learn desktopisms! Things don't need to be spaced out like everything is a touch interface. Be dense like IRC and Briar, don't be sparse like default Discord or SimpleX! Also treat your interfaces like a language for interaction, or a sandbox with tools; don't make interfaces that only corral and guide idiots, because a non-idiot may want to use it someday.

I really wish Stallman could be technology czar, with the power to [massively] tax noncompliance to his computing philosophy.

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#132

Post by Decabytes »

Flutter has brought the joy of desktop gui programming back for me. Especially in this vibe coding era, building all those apps that only really have value to me has never been easier. And seeing the support for Flutter from Canonical has been nice. They’ve been helping make flutter on Linux better

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#133

Post by rustcleaner »

nonethewiser wrote: post #37
ryandrake wrote: post #17

Almost all of Patrick's points are great if your software development goal is to make a buck . They don't seem to matter if you're writing open source, and I'd argue that desktop apps are still relevant and wonderful in the open source world. I just started a new hobby project, and am doing it as a cross-platform, non-Electron, desktop app because that's what I like to develop. The onboarding funnel: Only a concern i…

its just waaaaaay easier to distribute a web app For some things a desktop app is required (more system access) or offers some competitive UX advantage (although this reason is shrinking all the time). Short of that user's are going to choose web 95% of the time.

>or offers some competitive UX advantage (although this reason is shrinking all the time).

As a user, properly implemented desktop interface will always beat web. By properly, I mean obeying shortcut keys and conventions of the desktop world. Having alt+letter assignments to boxes and functions, Tab moves between elements, pressing PageUp/PageDown while in a text entry area for a chat window scrolls the chat history above and not the text entry area (looking at you SimpleX), etc.

Sorry, not sorry. Web interface is interface-smell, and I avoid it as much as possible. Give me a TUI before a webpage.

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#134

Post by rustcleaner »

fbrchps wrote: post #62
mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This points to our failure as an industry to design a universal app engine that isn't a browser.

Counterpoint: is the web browser not already fulfilling the "universal app engine" need? It can already run on most end user devices where people do most other things. IoT/Edge devices don't count here, but this day most of their data is just being sent back to a server which is accessible via some web interface. Ignoring the fragmentation of course; although that seems to be getting less and less each year (so long…

>Counterpoint: is the web browser not already fulfilling the "universal app engine" need?

Counter-counterpoint: Maybe it's time to require professional engineer certification before a software product can be shipped in a way that can be monetized. It's to filter devs from the industry who look at browsers today and go "Yeah, this is a good universal app engine."

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#135

Post by rustcleaner »

jcelerier wrote: post #101
jimbokun wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have failed to design a universal app engine…except for the one that dwarfs every other kind of software development for every kind of device in the world.

Can a single webpage address & use more than 4gb of ram nowadays? I was filling 16gb of ram with a single Ableton live session in 2011.

How about a webpage shouldn't ever address & use even 4GB of RAM! :O

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#136

Post by rustcleaner »

miki123211 wrote: post #81
ryandrake wrote: post #17

Almost all of Patrick's points are great if your software development goal is to make a buck . They don't seem to matter if you're writing open source, and I'd argue that desktop apps are still relevant and wonderful in the open source world. I just started a new hobby project, and am doing it as a cross-platform, non-Electron, desktop app because that's what I like to develop. The onboarding funnel: Only a concern i…

Attitudes like these is why non-developers don't want to use open source software. These concerns may not matter to you, the developer, but they absolutely matter to end-users. If your prospective user can't find the setup.exe they just downloaded, they won't be able to use your software. If your conversion and onboarding sucks, they'll get confused and try the commercial offering instead. If you don't gather analyti…

>Attitudes like these is why non-developers don't want to use open source software.

Good! It's not for them! They can stay paypigs on subscription because they can't git gud!

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#137

Post by robinsonb5 »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #124
IshKebab wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are definitely a shortage of good GUI toolkits - making one is a huge undertaking. GTK is mediocre, as you discovered. QtWidgets is extremely good though, even if it is effectively in maintenance mode. Avalonia also seems good too though I haven't used it myself.

I've used Qt off and on, and it's generally worked as advertised. Although when drawing very short lines on a canvas way back when (~2004), it wouldn't do a great job and I had to hack in custom routines that did a much better job. For prototyping / one-offs, I've always enjoyed working in Tcl/Itcl and Tk/Itk - object oriented Tcl with a decent set of widgets. It's not going to set the world on fire, but it's pretty…

> I've always enjoyed working in Tcl/Itcl and Tk/Itk

In the near future I need to lash up a windows utility to generate a bunch of PDF files from a CSV (in concert with GhostScript), with specific filenames. I was trying to figure out the best approach and hadn't even considered Tcl and Tk - with Itcl you might have just given me a new rabbithole to explore! Thanks! (...I think!)

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#138

Post by rustcleaner »

neilv wrote: post #26

> However, the existence of pirates is a stitch in my craw, particularly when any schoolmarm typing the name of my software into Google is prompted to try stealing it instead: I wonder whether Google, in its Don't Be Evil era, ever considered what they should do about software piracy, and what they decided. I'd guess they would've decided to either discourage piracy, or at least not encourage it. In the screenshot, t…

"Piracy" today is not stealing IP. It's not even what it used to mean, when it was originally used to describe rogue publishers who violated copyright. IP laws as used today against private downloaders and users are the legalization of plundering of people who do the equivalent of hear a fact/idea and act on it or use it. IP cannot be stolen, an "immunity from plundering" fee is what's being paid (license). The whole justification for it with software, namely copying from disc/internet to local storage, and then copying from local storage into RAM, is a legal formality to facilitate this plundering.

It is plundering those who didn't pay you for legal immunity.

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#139

Post by hermitcrab »

xantronix wrote: post #103
hermitcrab wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us are still making a living from desktop apps, 17 years later.

Please tell your tales. We beseech thee of thine humble wisdom.

I've written about it lots at:

https://www.successfulsoftware.net

Re: I'm done making desktop applications (2009)

#140

Post by irishcoffee »

jstanley wrote: post #97
irishcoffee wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't win. It just survived long enough. The web is a terrible platform. I haven't ever shipped a line of "web code" for money and I plan to keep it that way until I retire. What a miserable way to make a living.

Perhaps you're taking the npm/react/vercel world to be the entire web? I agree that that stuff is a scourge. But you can still just write html and Javascript and serve it from a static site, I wrote an outline in https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/web-programs.html which I frequently link to coding agents when they are going astray.

When I was a kid I was running websites with active forums and a real domain name, and I did it with vBulletin and my brain. Someone bought the domain name and website off of me, haven't touched web tech since. I did use Wt at an old job once, but the "website" was local to 1 machine and there were no security concerns.
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