141–150 of 515 posts
I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.
My opinion about this is that yes, we lost our way, and the reason is very simple, it is because we could. It was the path of least resistance, so we took it. Software has been freeriding on hardware improvements for a few decades, especially on web and desktop apps. Moore's law has been a blessing and a curse. The software you use today was written by people who learned their craft while this free-ride was still ful…
We use JITs and GPU acceleration and stuff in our mega frameworks, and maybe more importantly, we kind of maxed out the amount of crazy JS powered animations and features people actually want.
Well, except backdrop filter. That still slows everything down insanely whenever it feels like it.
I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.
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In the early 90s, I believe MS Word came on a few floppy disks and the main executable was 2MB. It ran fine on a 16Mhz 386 with a total of 2MB RAM (let that sink in!) It did pretty much everything it does now, only lacked a grammar checker. (WordPerfect had one.) Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained? We not only lost the way, we don’t even know the destination any more.
Having used that version of Word when it was the latest one, I can say the current ones have quite some added functionality (lots of very tiny things, and a few bigger ones), but I'm totally sure the same could be done with 10x less memory usage if MS would care about it. But there's no incentive to do it. Computers are faster and have lots of memory, and we don't depend on floppy disks any more. It would just cost them more money. Not saying that this is a good thing (I think the opposite, especially that I start thinking that software bloat might have a non-neglectable environmental impact), but as long as nobody complains strong enough (or as long as the EU doesn't come out with an anti-softare-bloat law... seems just a dream but who knows), that wont change. And I can clearly remember I had the same bloat-software feeling when I tried Office 2000 or XP, compared to Office 97, so there's nothing so new here.
As a final note, I've recently seen the source code of MS Word for Windows 1.0 on a GitHub repo (MS released it, see original release on Computer History Museum: https://computerhistory.org/blog/microsoft-word-for-windows-...). It was pure C, with even very large parts of code written in assembly! But the code is really ugly... totally incomparable to current C or C++ coding standards, patterns and language capabilities.
In the early 90s, I believe MS Word came on a few floppy disks and the main executable was 2MB. It ran fine on a 16Mhz 386 with a total of 2MB RAM (let that sink in!) It did pretty much everything it does now, only lacked a grammar checker. (WordPerfect had one.) Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained? We not only lost the way, we don’t even know the destination any more.
Hah! Good one. It's unfortunate, but true.
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Nah. But do it. You just have to open your source, that part which depends on Qt. It's not a real problem. But get a commercial license anyway, the cost is small compared to the other costs of developing your program, and you want to be friends with them. (There's someone on HN who lives on a single-line modification of an open source program. Trust me, source availability of the source code of your client app won't…
> There's someone on HN who lives on a single-line modification of an open source program Now I want to know more about this :-)
I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.
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Developers certainly like to have their completely integrated, connected and universal computing platform (the web). And users do not seem to particularly care about performance as long as it is good enough. And that is exactly the standard that is set, software is allowed to be so bad that it doesn't really annoy the user too much. Management doesn't care either, certainly creating good software isn't important when good enough software has already been developed.
Sure, I would like things to be different, but until one group decides that a drastic departure is necessary, nothing will change. There are also no real incentives for change, from any perspective.
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You can't use Qt?
You will still be in binary sign hell and Windows Defender may wake up one day and decide your app is a virus "when it does X", which is exactly it's business case. Complaining to MS will do nothing since their online thing will check and not find anything. Boom, entire software business gone for reason out of control. Doesn't care about your signed certificate too.