Goodbye, Native Apps

That seems like a fairly low bar to clear. Aside from the network request issue, I think every web application I've worked on for a decade or more would tick all of those boxes, from intranet tools to browser-based interfaces embedded in device firmware. I'm sure there are many others in the industry who could say the same. A lot of the things I'm thinking of are for internal use, but in terms of public examples, you can just look at most of the successful big-name business SAAS applications, and they tend to be strong on these requirements as well. Ease of use is a huge selling point for attracting customers, and no-one is winning points by being clunky in their web GUI in 2020.

Network speed and reliability is a different issue, and obviously many web applications are particularly vulnerable to problems there because they have such a strong communication element. But then the same is true of native applications that are for communication or a front-end to a client-server system like a central database.

Applications that meet these criteria include: Thunderbird, KiCAD, VLC, Vim, tmux, Blender, evince, Handbrake, and Pidgin.

That's an interesting set of examples. The other point under discussion was about whether web applications cause usability problems by deviating from native platform UI conventions. I can't help noticing that several of the native applications you mentioned there do exactly that.

For example, Blender's UI was infamous for being so unusual that anyone coming from other 3D modelling software found it hard to use, and for looking and behaving nothing like a conventional native application on a platform like Windows. Eventually, that became so much of a problem that they basically rewrote the whole UI layer to work in more conventional ways.

Handbrake has its good points, but its interface looks like a GUI from the early 2000s where the designer just threw as many different types of control onto a form layout as they could manage.

Thunderbird also has its good points, but its UI is incredibly glitchy in some areas (dragging and dropping comes to mind) and it definitely fails to meet your fast and responsive criteria at times.

Sorry, maybe that was written ambiguously, because that wasn't the intended point at all. The point I was trying to make was that the web applications that are slick are taking over the world. Being polished and easy to use is a big advantage, and IMHO there's been a lot more progress on this front in web development recently than in native applications.

In contrast, the mobile platforms are far too much style-over-substance and have glaring usability problems as a result.

Most desktop applications haven't really changed their basic form for decades, they just show up with flat icons and kindergarten levels of bright colours these days. That does mean here is a level of consistency and familiarity, which is valuable. However, it also means most of them aren't benefitting from decades of further experience and research in UI design and from newer UI patterns coming out of that experience that have proved to be effective in other contexts.

It's a meme.

> And how are non technical users supposed to know they should not do this?

For the same reason you need a license to legally drive a car. While I'm generally not a fan of the RTFM-attitude, I have absolutely no patience for people who are unwilling to even learn about the very basics of the complex machine they're operating.

Why on earth doesn't "the computer guy" tell them about where to learn the basics instead? Teach a man to fish an all that...

> There is, for instance, a large stack of perfectly fine laptops in my house because some people just bought new ones because the old one ‘was slow’ and they were fed up.

There's several reasons for that to happen - sometimes it starts at the point of simply buying the wrong product. Leaving the whole why-even-a-laptop-in-the-first-place aside, I have been convinced for the past 10 years now that 90% of all laptop users would be better served with a tablet (preferably an iPad).

First of all, non-technical users cannot make an informed purchase decision and way too often buy garbage products (e.g. low-tier CPU with not enough RAM) in order to save maybe 10%.

Secondly, instead of learning about the product they own and its limitations, they pile on crapware on top of bloatware and not once even manage to do basic maintenance (like disk clean-up, which is literally just a button press away).

"The computer guy" shouldn't "fix" their machines but advice them to just get an iPad instead - problem solved for both sides.

It's pretty short-sighted to blame a particular set of software packages for a whole pile of problems that stack upon each other:

• underpowered hardware

• complex operating systems that require knowledge and manual maintenance to keep them running smoothly

• increasingly bloated websites and ads (just test it yourself - HN allocates single-digit MB per tab, while a news site easily causes >200 MB allocations)

• computer illiterate users that are unwilling to learn even the very basics about their machine (Sapere aude!)

• an inability of users to judge their own needs and requirements vs their options in terms of technology (i.e. desktop PC vs laptop vs Chromebook vs tablet vs smartphone)

• the failure of the industry to communicate their target audience (i.e. you don't need a laptop to watch some Netflix, browse the web, do photo editing, etc.)

• not all operating systems are the same - sometimes all it takes is to make the switch (be that Linux or MacOS)

But no! That's way too much thinking and way too differentiated a view point! It's so much easier to just blame Chrome. Or Electron. Or JavaScript. Or Windows.

Anything but daring to actually form a complete picture...

But hey, that's basically today's Zeitgeist in a nutshell anyway I suppose.

If you did apps in days where C# and Java took over for C++ mobile still wasn't a thing and macos was super niche (especially in enterprise) - few people really cared about cross platform - demonstrated by C# being windows only and growing in popularity during the time.

Visual Studio dev experience was just better than anything comparable at the time (Borland stuff was dead by C# era) and C++ was just an inferior language for app development (especially pre modern C++ where you couldn't even rely on stl being implemented correctly across platforms and people regularly rolling their own containers)