141–150 of 231 posts
How is this getting uovoted ? Is nobody reading the article ? A few paragraphs in and I can see the author has terrible writing skills and doesn't know what he's talking about >In fact, writing software with C/C++ was hard because developers had to work with different operating system API(Application Programming Interface). Seriously ? Writing C++ apps is hard because you had to use different APIs ? That's the least…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While each native developer is still worrying about whether they're aligning and labelling a button in the platform-standard way, the web team is already refining their UI using the results of their third round of usability testing and has determined that the button shouldn't have been there in the first place and designed and implemented a more intuitive UI Your hypothetical scenario seems to be treating the app's…
In God we trust; all others must bring data. (Origin unknown) Your arguments use the word "probably" a lot. As someone who does a lot of UI design professionally, I prefer to rely on the kind of user testing you apparently dismiss, precisely because prior expectations about what works well so often turn out to be inaccurate. Indeed, there have been plenty of native platform standards that have awful usability in rece…
Platform native UI conventions are very often sub-optimal, if only because they're old. But sub-optimal standards are very often preferable to unpredictable, and are definitely preferable to having to juggle multiple conflicting UI conventions at the same time when multitasking. That's why we still have QWERTY, and why all the surviving scrollbars are on the right, and why pie menus never caught on.
You say you test UI designs professionally, and claim the higher ground of having empirical evidence. But it still sounds like you're using worthless methodology by focusing only on your one app at a time and ignoring how it fits into its environment and the user's broader workflow. Is that correct, or have you actually quantified the overall productivity loss an app introduces by violating the user's expectations and habits?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's totally possible to build a PWA that behaves like a native app but Apple actively tries to destroy them. It may look the part but it rarely feels like it. Something like OmniGraffle would not end up feeling the same. Even Microsoft's apps on mac feel better than their web-based counterparts in O365.
The fact you can just run it without installing anything makes up for a lot of faults (doubly so when the vendor isn't Microsoft but somebody nobody's ever heard of).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact you can just run it without installing anything makes up for a lot of faults (doubly so when the vendor isn't Microsoft but somebody nobody's ever heard of).
On the flip side, most web apps don't offer their full feature set without requiring you to go through a sign-up process that is at least as onerous as downloading and unzipping a Mac app bundle. Even when a web app outsources authentication to something like Facebook, there are still at least as many clicks.
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…
> Windows Forms will work for forever but hasn't been touched in a long time WinForms very recently got HiDPI support, better accessibility features, and was ported to .NET Core where they also fixed bugs in some controls. WPF in the meantime has been arbitrarily declared stable and Microsoft refuses to fix anything. Everybody is supposed to switch to UWP which they already deprecated or WinUI which hasn't been relea…
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…
You have to thank Borland's management for that. Delphi and C++ Builder are still around, but now only some lucky enterprise employees get to play with them. .NET Native and C++/CX were finally shaping up to be Microsoft's proper version of what .NET and Visual C++ should have been all along. However they are the most recent victims of the whole Reunion reboot, .NET Native now has uncertain future, while C++/CX got r…
While I like the idea of .NET AOT, the execution left so much to be desired. The developer experience is so bad that I’m shocked that it’s still required for Store UWP apps.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Part of the problem is a new twist on the old problem. I don't have to develop for Mac and Windows and Linux, I have to develop for Desktop PCs, Tablets, and Phones. My options are to create a GUI for each of them or use something like Bootstrap to build one that runs on them all, and that has limits and trade offs, but it's still pretty good.
One of the things I've done with this upgrade is provide a way for the user to store their data in the CouchDB native app running on their desktop PC. It's a "local-first" and "offline-first" web app so once it's installed it doesn't need or use an internet connection and while I have no way of making a comparison it appears to me to run pretty close to native app speeds.
When CouchDB is installed on the user's desktop PC any web app configured to use it can use it. It only requires the user fills out a simple web form to set up a user and database for the app.
Taken together, a modern web browser and CouchDB come pretty close to fully featured client side runtime environment for desktop PC web apps. It wouldn't be too hard to create a web app that looks and feels very much like a native app when running full screen on a Mac and Windows.
A client side runtime for web apps is something I've been thinking we need since I built my first web app and that was before they were even called "web apps". I'm not the guy to make that, but I think we need it. CouchDB and a web browser come pretty close.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's totally possible to build a PWA that behaves like a native app but Apple actively tries to destroy them. It may look the part but it rarely feels like it. Something like OmniGraffle would not end up feeling the same. Even Microsoft's apps on mac feel better than their web-based counterparts in O365.
It easily could feel like it, given a very reasonable amount of support by platform owners. There is nothing magical about Ui powered by compiled vs interpreted code. It is limitations in the platforms that are the roadblocks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OmniGraffle could be fine; hasn't Figma shown us the way?
Figma falls into the trap of all other claimed high performing web apps, conflating maintaining a 60fps refresh rate with responsiveness. Try dragging any object around (even simple shapes) and you'll see it trail the mouse cursor in Figma. Does not happen in OmniGraffle. The result is a distinct difference in feel.